Chapter 9
Nine
Madison
Dad answers the door in his work jacket when I arrive at my parents’ house.
“Morning,” he says, his voice flat.
“Morning.” My eyes flick past him, scanning the quiet hallway. “Where’s Mom?”
His mouth tightens as a familiar shadow crosses his face. “She’s in bed. Been a bad couple of days.”
My chest sinks. “Bad how?”
He shrugs, looking down at his boots. “Low.”
I nod once and slip past him, already heading for the stairs. I take them slowly, muttering a string of colorful curses under my breath as my back protests the incline.
Her room smells of untouched toast and stale air. The plate sits on the dresser exactly where I expect it to be. Bread barely bitten. Tea gone cold. It’s another cycle. Another descent into the quiet.
She’s lying on her side, facing the wall. Her dark hair is loose across the pillow, her shoulders curled inward like she’s trying to disappear into the mattress.
“Mom,” I say gently.
Nothing.
I move closer and sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress dips with a tiny groan from the springs, but she barely reacts.
“Hey,” I try again. “It’s me. Madi.”
Her eyes flicker, but they don’t quite focus on me. They’re looking at something miles away. My throat tightens, and the professional woman is momentarily replaced by the little girl who used to check whether her mother was still breathing.
“Come on. You’ve got to eat so you can take your medication.”
Still nothing.
I reach for her arm. She feels smaller than she should.
“I know,” I murmur, more to myself than to her. “I know it’s hard.”
I help her sit up, biting back a hiss when my back flares in a blinding white heat.
Of all the mornings to be a human glow-stick.
She winces but lets me guide her, leaning into me the way she used to when I was a kid, and she’d come into my room after a nightmare. The roles reversed so long ago, I can barely remember the original script.
I break off pieces of toast and hold them to her mouth. She eats one bite at a time.
“Good,” I say softly. “That’s it.”
I hand her the pills and watch her swallow them. Only then do I let myself breathe.
“I’ll be back later, okay?” I tell her, kissing her forehead.
She doesn’t answer because she’s already drifting back toward the wall.
Downstairs, Dad is at the door.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“Work.”
My hand grips the banister. “I thought you were semi-retired.”
“I am.”
“You swore last year, Dad. You said you were done with the sixty-hour weeks.”
“I need to work, Mads.”
He does. He’s an electrician who’s spent forty years working himself to the bone to give us a life where we didn’t have to worry about the light bill. But working for himself means he can step back. He chooses his hours.
Sometimes I resent him for leaving.
I hate myself for it because I know he loves her, but when she’s like this, he can’t cope.
He never could. He escapes into the tangles of wires and circuit breakers because they make sense.
They have a logic. My mother’s brain doesn’t.
He escapes into work, leaving the rest of us to hold our breath.
“She can’t be on her own like this,” I say quietly.
He gestures toward me like the answer is written on my forehead. “You’re here.”
“For now.”
He pauses, looking at me properly for the first time. The exhaustion in his eyes mirrors my own. “I can’t stay all day. I have a job.”
“Neither can I!” I snap, the stress from the Senator, the treadmill, and the back pain finally boiling over. “I have to work too, Dad. I have people who depend on me.”
The words are barely out of my mouth when his phone rings and the world calls him away.
He kisses my cheek. “I’ll call later.”
“Dad—”
But he’s already gone.
Fuck.
I stand in the kitchen, breathing through the pressure building behind my eyes. I have a conference call in an hour. A big one. A client whose name has been trending since dawn for all the wrong reasons. A team expecting me to fix something ugly with calm words and steady hands.
I grab my phone. My thumb hovers over the family group chat.
Piper. No answer. Probably buried in wedding fabric.
Rowan. Straight to voicemail. Probably in a different time zone or up to her eyeballs in paint.
Noah picks up on the third ring.
“Hey,” he says.
“I need you.”
Twenty minutes later, my brother is in the kitchen, shrugging off his coat as I pace the floor.
“I can’t do this right now,” I stammer, my hands shaking. “I’ve got work. She’s not well. Dad’s gone. Piper’s MIA. Rowan’s…”
“Madison.” Noah steps into my space, his large hands pressing firmly against my shoulders. “Breathe. Just breathe.”
I hate how instinctive it is, how easily my body obeys him.
In.
Out.
He’s only two years older than me, but he’s always been the anchor. He’s the steady one. He was the closest thing we had to a parent when our parents couldn’t be. It’s no wonder he became a therapist.
“I have the morning free,” he says. “I’ll stay.”
Relief hits me so hard that I have to lean into him.
I fill him in quickly. Meds. Toast. The vacant look in her eyes. He nods, filing it all away with clinical precision.
“Open a window upstairs,” I add, pointing at him. “She needs air. It’s stagnant up there.”
He raises an eyebrow, his gaze dropping to my careful posture. “Aren’t you supposed to be resting? I heard about hot yoga.”
I roll my eyes. “No rest for the wicked.”
“You need to slow down, Madi. Seriously.”
I arch an eyebrow, mirroring his look. “And we both know what happens when we slow down, don’t we? We start thinking.”
He sighs. “You’re not Mom.”
“You chose psychology to make sure we never would be,” I fire back.
That earns me a sad, knowing smile. He pulls me into a hug, and for a second, I let myself be the sister instead of the fixer. We’ve danced this dance since we were teenagers. Before there was a clinical name for what Mom was going through, we were the cleanup crew.
I spent my life trying to fix the woman upstairs.
Noah studied psychology because he wants nothing more than to understand her.
“He does this,” I whisper into his shoulder. “When things get hard, Dad disappears. He always has.”
“Yeah,” Noah exhales.
“It’s not like he doesn’t care,” I add quickly, my internal defense mechanism kicking in. “I know he does. He just… he can’t sit in the quiet. He doesn’t know what to say to her when she won’t talk back.”
“He never could,” Noah says. “But someone had to be the adult.”
We both know who that someone was. It was the two of us, huddled in the hallway, deciding who would make dinner and who would check the medicine cabinet.
“I called the girls,” I say, pulling away. “Piper didn’t answer. Rowan went to voicemail. And honestly…”
“Honestly what?”
“I don’t like involving them,” I admit, staring at a chip in the kitchen counter. “I never have.”
“Why?”
“Because I was the one who was here when it got bad. You and me. They weren’t. I don’t want them carrying this. I don’t want it shaping them the way it shaped us. I want them to have the normal version of our family.”
Noah’s expression softens. “Mads, they didn’t see it because we didn’t let them. But they’re not kids anymore. They can help. Maybe not the way we do, but that doesn’t mean we get to decide they don’t get to show up. You’re gatekeeping the trauma. Let them in.”
I huff out a breath. “You make it sound so reasonable. It’s annoying.”
“I’m a therapist,” he says dryly. “It’s literally my job. Now go. Fix whatever you need to fix. I’ve got Mom.”
“Text me if anything changes,” I tell him as I grab my bag.
“I will.”
I hesitate at the door, the guilt already curling in my stomach.
I look back at the house—the house that holds so many silent ghosts—then I leave.
I always do.
And I hate that I have to.