Chapter 13
The drive to Portland took just over two hours but Hazel didn’t remember most of it.
The sky was the same dim pewter it had been for days— low clouds dragging themselves across the coast, too thick for light, too restless for snow.
Her cars wipers squeaked over the windshield at irregular intervals, smearing the mist rather than clearing it.
Traffic was light. The radio stayed off.
She’d meant to go last week. And the week before that.
But there was always something: a vendor to call, a batch to remake, a reason not to drive south. And then she’d told herself it was the holidays… the bakery was busy. And with the threat of winter looming, the roads often weren’t great.
But the truth was simpler.
She was scared.
The Casco Bay Recovery Center sat on the outskirts of Portland, just past a stretch of low industrial buildings and a wooded park she remembered visiting once on a school field trip.
The facility itself was quiet and clean, set back from the road with wide picture windows and a faded sign staked near the entrance.
There was something inherently coastal about it— white clapboard, slate-blue trim, a gull perched on the lamppost in the parking lot.
You wouldn’t know what it was from the outside unless you were looking for it.
Hazel pulled in and parked beneath a bare tree, the branches dark and looming above her.
She turned off the engine and sat with her hands on the wheel for a moment.
The vents ticked softly as the car cooled and in her chest, something moved— a small, fluttery ache that felt like dread softened by love.
She hadn’t told anyone back in Bar Harbor she was doing this today. She hadn’t even called to give the staff here a heads up, though they always said walk-ins were welcome. It wasn’t about scheduling. It was about… bracing.
Bracing for the version of her mother she might find today.
Lucid or distant. Kind or raw. There were rare days when the fog lifted completely, revealing someone soft and startlingly present— her voice gentle, her gaze clear, asking about Hazel’s life with a kind of fragile hope, like she was trying to step back into the shape of a mother she’d never quite had the chance to become.
And then there were the other days.
The harder ones. When her mother’s eyes looked right through her, or worse— saw something Hazel couldn’t name, couldn’t reach. When sentences unraveled halfway through, or her hands trembled with nerves she couldn’t hide.
Growing up, Hazel had learned to hold space for all of it, but it still took a kind of quiet courage to walk through those doors. That was why she hadn’t rushed to come— she needed to be ready for whatever version of her mother she would find, and until today, she wasn’t sure she could be.
The two-hour drive down from the coast had been silent, slow, her knuckles white against the wheel, her breath steadying in the hush of mid-afternoon.
Inside, the front lobby was warm and over lit.
Fluorescent light bounced off pale linoleum floors and soft seafoam walls.
A pine-scented wreath hung lopsided above the reception desk and someone had stacked holiday cards beside a jar of pens, each envelope bearing the neat scrawl of returning visitors.
The scent was a strange mix of sugar cookies, institutional soap, and hand sanitizer.
Hazel signed in. The receptionist, a woman with cropped silver hair and a brooch shaped like a snowflake, greeted her with a kind smile and handed her a visitor badge. “She’s in her room,” the woman said, like she knew what this— Hazel being here— meant. “Third floor. You remember the way?”
Hazel nodded. “I do.”
The elevator was slow. Hazel stared at the numbers as they lit one by one, her reflection a ghost in the stainless steel doors.
She looked tired. Her eyes were shadowed, her hair loose over her shoulders, her sweater slightly damp at the cuffs from walking through drizzle.
She felt like she was shrinking into her own skin, like her body was trying to make itself small enough to survive this.
She didn’t feel ready, not anymore, but she wasn’t sure she ever would be, not fully.
The third floor was quieter than she remembered.
She passed a recreation room with a half-assembled puzzle on the table and a nurse checking a clipboard beside the vending machine.
At the end of the hallway, a window overlooked the parking lot and the sea beyond it, just a sliver of grey beyond the trees.
Her mother’s room was halfway down the hall, number 312. The door was ajar.
Hazel stood outside it for a beat too long, her hand hovering near the frame, her heartbeat high in her throat.
The scent of rosemary and chamomile drifted from inside, faint but familiar.
It was the kind of smell that made her think of bathrobes and tea bags and old drawers lined with sachets that never lost their strength.
She knocked, her knuckles gentle against the wooden door.
“Come in,” came a voice, soft and unhurried.
Hazel pushed the door open.
The room was small but bright, just as she remembered it.
There was the same narrow bed, the same writing desk, the same padded chair by the window.
A calendar hung beside a bulletin board with no pins, only taped edges, and a small bookshelf housed a few paperbacks.
There were books filled with crossword puzzles and a photo frame with no glass that held an image of Hazel as a teenager she hadn’t known existed.
Her mother was seated by the window in a thick green cardigan, her legs curled beneath her, a mug resting on the windowsill beside her. She looked up as the door pushed open and her whole face changed.
“Hazel,” her mother said, her voice catching slightly on the name, like it had weight. Like it meant something.
Hazel’s throat closed for a beat. Her hands stilled at her sides, breath hitching in her chest. It had been a few years since she had laid eyes on her mother, but she looked just the same.
An older, softer version of Hazel herself, with the same olive-toned skin, the same dark hair, the same cheeks dotted with freckles.
“Hi, Mom.”
Her mother’s face softened, folding into something warm and full.
She adjusted her mug carefully on the windowsill, her fingers trembling just slightly, and stood.
For a second, Hazel thought she might just smile and stay where she was, but then her mother moved, crossing the linoleum in her slippered feet and gathering Hazel into a hug.
She froze.
For the briefest moment, she didn’t know what to do with her hands, didn’t know how to absorb the shape of the moment.
It had been so long since she’d been held like this by her mother— so long since the scent of rosemary tinted lotion and tea had been something real and not imagined.
But then her body caught up to the memory, and her arms wrapped around the woman who’d once sung to her in the dark and whispered bedtime stories like secrets.
Her mother pressed a kiss to her cheek as she pulled back, soft, careful, and familiar.
“Oh, my girl.” Her voice was fuller now, brightened with something like joy. “I’m so happy to see you. I didn’t know you were coming.”
Hazel held on a second longer than she meant to, her face buried in the curve of her mother’s shoulder.
Her throat was so tight she wasn’t sure how she’d ever find the room to breathe, let alone speak.
But after another moment there, in the silence, she swallowed, clearing some of the lingering emotion that had gathered.
“I thought I’d make it a surprise,” she murmured as they pulled apart. She stepped further into the room, her boots barely making a sound on the floor. “I hope that’s okay.”
“It’s better than okay.” Her mother smiled, and it was the kind of smile that touched her eyes, brightening their green and brown depths. “Come sit, I was just watching the birds. They’re greedy this week, I think they know something we don’t. Must be a lot of snow coming.”
Hazel smiled faintly and moved to sit beside her, easing onto the cushion beneath the window. The seat was warm from the radiator below.
Her mother sat down again beside her, tucking one foot beneath the other. She reached for Hazel’s hand as she sat, her fingers cool but sure.
“How’s Boston?” her mother asked, brushing a thumb across Hazel’s knuckles. “How are you?”
The question landed like a pin dropped in a still room.
Hazel’s breath caught. She opened her mouth, then closed it again, unsure of how to shape the truth into something her mother could hold.
That one word— Boston— was heavy with all the things her mother didn’t know; that Hazel hadn’t lived there in months, and that her apartment was still full of her things, even though the lease was ending soon.
The job she had worked so hard for had already been left behind and the city itself had stopped feeling like home long ago and, instead, had started feeling like a cage.
Her mother didn’t know she’d left. Didn’t know she’d come home.
She also didn’t know, would never know, not really, that her own mother was gone.
Hazel stared at their joined hands and the warmth of her mother’s skin beneath hers, the quiet steadiness of this moment. She could feel the tilt of a decision forming in her chest.
This was a good day. And good days were delicate.
She had to do what she could to preserve it. And so she did.
“I’ve actually moved,” Hazel said, working to keep her voice level.
Her mother’s eyebrows lifted, eyes brightening as though someone had opened a curtain behind them.
“You did?” she asked, leaning forward. “Where to?”
Hazel hesitated again. The truth was simple, but saying it aloud felt like cracking something open. Like admitting a truth she had been quietly keeping locked away for months.
“Bar Harbor,” she said. “I moved back.”
A beat of silence stretched between them.