Chapter Nine
Morgan was feeling sick to her stomach. Her palms were so clammy that she kept having to rub them on her jeans. Twice she had run upstairs to change her shirt, just in case of sweat stains.
The last thing she needed was to give her mother any ammunition to bring out any passive-aggressive remarks like, “I guess we all have our off days, Morgan.”
Walking past the mirror hanging in her short hallway, Morgan stopped to check her reflection.
Her hair was pulled back, a few strands had gone rogue and were hanging past her temples.
Her mascara was done neatly, her blush perfectly applied, and she even had a layer of red lipstick on her lips.
A picture-perfect daughter for an impeccable yet distant mother.
The last time Morgan had seen Deidre was nearly two years ago, at a medical conference in New York.
They had chatted briefly about the use of Tumor Treating Fields and then she had proceeded to tell Morgan about the recent death of her aunt Sophie.
Morgan hadn’t even known that Aunt Sophie was battling cancer.
The news had been so awful that Morgan had spent the rest of the day in a state of shock. She was moving and talking like she was on autopilot, her body and mind numb to everything around her.
She had yet to forgive her mother for springing such devastating news on her so casually.
Now, with everything going on, Morgan couldn’t possibly receive more bad news.
She was barely trying to get through her existential crisis and her next appointment with Dr. Henry was only in six days’ time.
Six days that felt way too long. She had even considered moving up the appointment, but she thought better of it.
What would she even say? ‘I need to see you ASAP, Dr. Henry, because I think my mother might be dying. The woman I’d spent my entire life trying to please but still can’t manage to get her fucking approval.
There’s just absolutely no other reason she’d want to see me unless she was at grave’s door’.
Morgan had spent most of the night wriggling around in bed, wondering if she should cry or get angry or hug her mother when she announced she was sick.
She had ruled out hugging since they weren’t a touchy family, and she had set aside the tears, deciding that sadness required actual grief.
Instead, Morgan had settled on anger. Whether she would be angry at her mother for dying or at the universe for letting it happen before they could reconcile like she always dreamt they would, was yet to be decided.
The alarm on her cell phone sounded.
In exactly fifteen minutes, she was going to meet her mother at Stella’s Coffee House.
Two coffee dates in the space of two days at the same place seemed almost farcical, especially when neither of them had been initiated by her. There was no way Morgan could’ve declined her mother’s invitation, and there had been no reason to decline Sydney’s.
Though the two meetings were vastly different.
Besides, Morgan had quite enjoyed her coffee with Sydney. The woman had looked so lovely in that pale yellow linen dress, with her hair pulled back in a messy bun, and those tattoos on her arms basically glowing in the fluorescent light.
Everything about their time together yesterday had come as a surprise.
The conversation, the way Sydney held her gaze fierce and unapologetic, the fact that Sydney had asked her to join on a camping trip as if Morgan was fifteen years younger and was open to spontaneous trips where she could tolerate sleeping on a thin mattress on the ground, was highly flattering.
And the way Sydney had kissed her on her cheek, her heart beating so loudly Morgan had heard it—or imagined it—was probably the highlight of her day.
Actually, it was the highlight of her week.
She checked her watch, a Cartier Ballon Bleu which she had bought herself after getting the chief of neurosurgery position.
It symbolized another time in her life. A time she didn’t want to remember.
Morgan removed the watch from her wrist and stuffed it into the drawer of the console table standing beneath the mirror.
She gave one last look at her reflection and grabbed the door keys.
Outside, the sky was a crisp blue. Not a cloud in sight. A flock of geese flew overhead, their honking breaking the morning silence.
It had to be a good sign, didn’t it?
The day Emily had died on Morgan’s operating table, it was raining hard, which considering June was the beginning of the dry season in San Francisco, she should’ve known something bad was going to happen.
Maybe her mother wasn’t dying.
When Morgan walked through the door of Stella’s eight minutes later, the first thing she did was catch sight of the table where she and Sydney had sat yesterday.
Her eyes were glued to where they had played footsie under the table, where Morgan had wondered what it would be like to go on an actual date with the woman.
She smiled as she thought about what it would be like to take a walk on the beach, have a nice dinner, and then dessert.
Morgan took a big gulp of air when she spotted Dr. Deidre sitting at a table closest to the bookcase.
Her mother looked just like her, with black hair, gray eyes, and alabaster skin.
The only difference was that her mother’s hair was dead straight and the lines beside her eyes, her forehead, and at the corners of her mouth were far more evident.
For as long as Morgan could remember, her mother’s lips had been permanently puckered, as if she had a perpetual sour taste in her mouth, and she only ever wore expensive tailored suits with Louboutin heels.
To everyone else, Dr. Deidre looked like the epitome of sophistication and success.
To Morgan, she looked like an implacable vision of perfection that felt completely unapproachable.
“Morgan,” Deidre said, though she made no effort to stand up. “I’m glad you could make it.” She gestured to the chair opposite her. “Have a seat.”
Morgan slid into the chair and sat with her hands in her lap. The waiter from yesterday was tending to customers at the display case. She could do with a temporary distraction, especially when her mother’s penetrative gaze was like a laser sight in the middle of her forehead.
“How are you?” her mother asked, though her tone of voice made it seem as if she had asked the question as a formality instead out of general interest.
Two could play that game.
“Are you sick?” Morgan asked, keeping an equally disinterested tone, though it was much harder to do. She felt like she was being eaten alive from the inside.
Deidre’s composure shattered, cracking her flawless fa?ade like a shell. She frowned and her mouth twisted in a way Morgan had never seen before. “I am not. Why would you think that?”
“Because I can’t think of any other reason that you would come out here all the way from Los Angeles.”
“I am here because I had to hear from the chief of surgery at Sequoia about your nervous breakdown,” Deidre said, sitting up even straighter.
She had the posture of a soldier from all the years of professional ballet.
“You may think I don’t care, Morgan. You may believe that I don’t ever think about you, that I go about my life without even remembering that I have a daughter.
But I do think about you all the time.” It was almost heartfelt, almost earnest, and Morgan had almost melted into a ball of gooeyness.
“And that’s why I’m here to tell you that you need to get back to work. ”
And just like that, the sincere moment was gone.
“You came all the way here to tell me to go back to work?” Morgan sighed, having lost not only a bit of patience, but also another slice of her sanity.
The only thing that seemed to be making this morning better was remembering how Sydney had looked so reluctant to go back to work yesterday, just as reluctant as Morgan had been to see her go.
“Just because you lost a patient doesn’t mean you should give up your entire career,” Deidre said. Her steely composure was back in place, her expression was a frozen mask of seriousness. Any hint of amusement or empathy had been scrubbed away.
“I don’t want to go back,” Morgan said. She would’ve added, Not yet anyway, but she knew it would piss her mother off more if she expressed her reluctance to go back so bluntly.
She used to get quite a bit of satisfaction in pissing her mother off, especially during her sixteen-year-old I-hate-the-world phase when she had shaved off all her hair.
“So what? Are you going to hide out in this town forever? Run away from your responsibilities? You’re an accomplished neurosurgeon, Morgan.
Your work is world-renowned.” Deidre’s eyes were shards of glass.
“You can’t just give up because things are tough.
It’s embarrassing. You’ve embarrassed yourself, Morgan.
The sooner you go back and set things right, the better.
Before you turn into one of those people, drifting through life with no real direction or ambition. ”
“Those people?”
Deidre wrinkled her nose. “This is not San Francisco, dear. You do not belong here.”
Morgan was forty-two years old, yet for some reason in her mother’s presence she felt like that small, thirteen-year-old girl who couldn’t understand why Mom and Dad were going to Paris over Christmas break… without her.
But she wasn’t a little girl anymore and she could dictate the course of her own life.
“I do belong here and I’m going to stay right here in this lovely town and hang out with all these lovely people who don’t have doctorates and ambitions.
” She spat the word ambitions because it was absolutely not true.
Every person she had met so far in Carmel-by-the sea was driven in their own way.
Sydney was a firefighter, saving lives. Tessa was a successful interior decorator, helping to create clients’ dream homes.
Her mother was the first to stand up, even before the waiter could arrive to take their order. “Call me when you’ve come to your senses.” She grabbed her handbag off the chair rest, shrugged it over her shoulder, and marched off toward the door.
Morgan watched her walk down the sidewalk, focusing on the red soles of her mother’s Louboutins. Her skin suddenly felt hot, her chest tightened with rage. She felt angry but also powerful, as if she had just won the war. Power like that made her feel invincible.
Before she knew what she was doing, Morgan had already fished out her cell phone from her handbag and was calling Sydney.
“Morgan, is everything alright? I didn’t think you’d be the first to—”
“Count me in for your camping trip,” Morgan blurted. There was a red haze in front of her eyes, a cloud of anger that dulled the part of her brain—the prefrontal cortex—responsible for rational thought.
“Are you serious?” Sydney’s voice sounded cheery through the speaker.
“I am,” Morgan replied, though that anger was beginning to dwindle, and she wondered if she had made a huge mistake.
Of course she had. There could be nothing worse than camping. And doing it with Sydney and her people, who she didn’t even know well, sounded like a nightmare she couldn’t escape from.
What the hell was she thinking?
Would it make her seem crazy if she changed her mind, blurted, Actually, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I hate camping. Count me out. Goodbye.
But she didn’t say any of that. Morgan only listened to Sydney’s sweet voice. “Amazing. It’s going to be so much fun; I promise. I’ll send you all the details, alright? As soon as I get off my shift, I’ll send it.”
Morgan doubted it would be fun, or more so, she was certain it would be positively horrible. All those bugs, the lack of decent showers, the joy of trying to sleep on a lumpy ground… being so close to Sydney… the day couldn’t get any worse.
“Fine,” she grumbled and then ended the call, feeling horrible, as if she were coming off the tail end of a dreadful hangover.
Fuck.