Chapter 13 #3
She’d padded down the hallway in her socks, her shoulder pressing to the wallpaper.
From the top of the stairs, she’d seen the kitchen light on, and slowly crept down, one at a time, careful to step around the places she knew would creak.
Hidden behind the wooden railing, she saw the curve of her mother’s back as she rifled through the kitchen drawers, muttering to herself, slamming one closed before yanking another open.
Her grandmother stood a few feet away, arms out, her calm voice trying to tether her to the ground. Trying to draw her back to them.
Hazel didn’t understand most of what her mother was saying.
It was something about wires in the walls, something about the government tracking them, about needing to leave, now, before it was too late.
About how if she could just find the proof, here, in the drawers, maybe then someone would finally believe her.
It had taken a few minutes, but eventually, her grandmother had noticed Hazel hiding on the stairs.
She had walked over with quick steps, pulling her back by the shoulders and steering her into her bedroom without a word.
She didn’t scold and didn’t explain, she just smoothed Hazel’s hair, tucked her in, and told her to stay.
But she hadn’t listened.
She waited until the house was quiet again, then crept to the top of the stairs once more, and listened.
Her grandmother stood at the bottom of the stairs, turned towards the kitchen, her eyes still trained on her only child as she rifled through the drawers.
There was a distinct sadness in her profile, one that Hazel had recognized from years of this.
In her hand, her grandmother held the house phone, pulled slightly away from her face, switched to speaker mode.
Hazel had recognized the voice immediately.
It was low, even, and practiced— her mother’s doctor.
She remembered the way her grandmother’s tone changed when she spoke to him; the exhaustion she felt shown bare, on full display.
“Sometimes, this is just the way this illness works,” he’d said gently, voice carrying up the stairwell and wrapping around Hazel, sending a rough shiver down her spine.
“For some people, managing symptoms on their own isn’t possible.
They need consistency. No stress. Controlled environments.
Not just medication, but monitoring. Full-time care. ”
Hazel didn’t hear her grandmother respond, but she felt it— the way silence could sound like a person folding in on themselves.
“She needs to stay at the facility this time, Wendy,” the doctor continued. “It has to be permanent. I’m sorry.”
Hazel had backed away from the stairs and climbed into bed without another word, without another thought. She didn’t cry, not that night— she just stared up at the glow in the dark stars affixed to her ceiling in the shapes of her favourite galaxies, and tried to lose herself within it.
They drove her mother back to Portland the next day.
Hazel remembered turning back to look as they’d left her behind that final time. Her mother didn’t wave. She just stared ahead, both hands on her knees like she was bracing for impact. Like she was already somewhere else.
Now, years later, Hazel was sitting across from her mother again. And her mother was here. Smiling, remembering, reaching across the gap.
“You always had such strong hands,” her mother said, her fingers gently wrapping around Hazel’s, giving them a soft squeeze. “Even when you were little. You used to grip my fingers so tight. Like you were afraid I’d disappear.”
Her mother’s voice had gone soft again, just barely loud enough to be heard above the rhythmic sound of the radiators trying to warm the room against the chill outside.
“I didn’t know how to hold on,” her mother whispered, her warm eyes pouring into Hazel’s. Her gaze was strong, but also weak. Warm, but also filled with something deeper— sharper. Guilt, maybe. Or pain. “But I wanted to. I always wanted to. You know that, don’t you?”
The words caught somewhere low and buried, trapped behind the sharp pull in her chest and the sudden, hot sting rising in her throat.
Her mother’s hand was still wrapped around hers, steady now, fingers warm despite the chill in Hazel’s skin.
And that sentence— I always wanted to— echoed in the spaces Hazel had spent years trying to seal up.
The ones she’d patched over with habit and work and distance.
The ones where she’d hidden the ache of birthdays forgotten, school plays missed, the smell of burnt toast and panic thick in the walls of her childhood home.
She blinked hard.
It would have been easier if her mother had said nothing. If she’d stayed vague, or surface-level, or disappeared behind the fog of her illness like so many times before.
But she hadn’t.
She’d remembered. And she’d meant it.
And Hazel, for all her careful boundaries, felt something inside her crack wide open.
She nodded, just once, and squeezed her mother’s hand within her own, leaning a little closer.
“I know,” she said, voice low and ragged at the edges. “I know you did, Mom. It’s okay.”
And she did know. Now, with all the distance, it was okay. Even if it didn’t change what came after. Even if it couldn’t fix what had already been lost. It mattered, anyway.
They didn’t talk much after that.
Not because the conversation had run out, just because it didn’t need to be filled. The quiet between them had changed its shape. It was no longer fragile or tense.
Her mother leaned back into her chair again, a contented little sigh escaping her lips as she looked back out at the snow-speckled trees.
“You should get going before the roads get bad,” she said eventually, without turning her head. Not a dismissal, just something real. A lingering piece of being a mother that had held on, after all this time.
Hazel didn’t argue. She didn’t want to leave, but she also didn’t want to risk trying to stretch the moment too far. She knew better than that.
She stood, reaching for her coat. Her sleeves were still warm from the radiator beneath the window. Her movements felt distant, like watching someone else perform a ritual she knew by heart.
Her mother looked up again, still smiling softly. “Will you come again?” she asked.
The question was simple, but something about it fractured Hazel clean through.
Not can you, not maybe. Just: will you?
Hazel swallowed against the knot rising in her throat and she nodded once.
“I will,” she said. “Soon. I promise.”
Her mother’s smile deepened, the corners of her eyes crinkling faintly.
“Good,” she said. “I’ll keep the birds company until then.”
Hazel laughed, though it sounded more like a breath than a sound. She lifted a hand, half wave, half goodbye, and turned toward the door.
The hallway felt colder than before. More echoing. She moved past the recreation room again, past the nurses’ station and the bulletin board with the same faded construction-paper snowflakes pinned to it. The elevator took longer this time. Or maybe she just noticed the wait more.
She didn’t look at herself in the reflective metal of the doors.
Outside, the wind had picked up. It nipped at the edges of her coat as she stepped back into the grey afternoon.
She climbed into the driver’s seat of her car and shut the door. The silence hit her like a wave. Not the silence of the room upstairs— that had been warm, held in chamomile and wool and the steady rhythm of her mother’s peaceful voice. That silence had been alive with memory, soft with presence.
This one was cavernous. Sharp and hollow, the kind that echoed in the bones.
Hazel sat there, hands wrapped around the steering wheel, her breath beginning to fog the inside of the windshield in soft, uneven bursts. Her body was upright, but only barely, like she was being held together by the shape of the car, not by her own spine.
She couldn’t move. Not yet.
The scent of rosemary clung faintly to her coat. Or maybe that was her imagination, her memory playing tricks. Her eyes tracked a single snowflake as it drifted onto the glass, landed, and melted in a slow, uneven bloom.
The tears came without ceremony.
No hitch in her breath, no gasp— just a quiet undoing.
One drop slipped free, then another. They trailed down her cheeks and along her jaw, soaking into the fabric of her collar. She didn’t reach for them, didn’t bother to swipe them away. They were part of it. Part of this, of her.
And she couldn’t even name it— this thing in her chest that felt too heavy and too light all at once.
It wasn’t just grief and it wasn’t just relief.
It wasn’t just love or guilt or nostalgia.
It was the sound of holding on and letting go at the exact same time.
It was the weight of two decades spent trying not to hope.
Hazel leaned forward, pressing her forehead to the steering wheel. The leather was cold against her skin. She closed her eyes, breathed through her mouth, felt her heartbeat pulse against the curve of her ribs like it didn’t know where to go.
Even after the tears slowed and the pressure behind her eyes dulled to a throb, she sat for another long minute, watching her own reflection fade and reform in the fogged glass. The clouds above the parking lot had dropped lower, darker now, threatening snow.
After another moment, she reached for the keys.
The engine turned over with a low hum, the heater clicking to life in bursts. She turned the defroster on full blast, adjusted the vents with one hand, and shifted into reverse.
It was two hours back to Bar Harbor. She barely remembered the drive down, and she wasn’t sure she’d remember this one, either. But her hands knew the motions. Her foot found the pedal. The car eased out of the lot and onto the road, tires hissing against wet pavement.
She didn’t turn on the music, she still couldn’t bare the sound of it. There was too much noise in her head already.