45. Jenna
Jenna
“I’m pretty sure that pan was clean ten minutes ago,” Ma says from the stove.
I drop the sponge into the sink, my fingers stiff and wrinkled from the hot water. “It had a spot.”
Ma turns the burner down to a simmer, wiping her hands on her apron.
She leans against the counter, watching me with that new, unsettling clarity she’s developed since she quit drinking.
“Jenna,” she says, her voice stripped of its usual nervous energy, replaced by a gentle steadiness I am still learning how to navigate.
“Is there anything you want to talk about?”
I dry my hands on a dish towel, folding it into precise, mathematically perfect thirds before draping it over the oven handle. The silence in the kitchen feels thick, pressing inward against my ribs. I look at the small red chip sitting proudly on the windowsill. Thirty days.
“Do you regret it?” I ask, my voice smaller than I want it to be.
Ma tilts her head. “Regret what?”
“Marrying Dad.”
She goes entirely still. Then, with deliberate slowness, she reaches over and turns the stove completely off.
The kitchen is suddenly devoid of the ambient hiss of gas.
She pulls out a chair at the small table and sits, gesturing for me to do the same.
I hesitate, then take the seat across from her, maintaining perfect posture because if I let myself slouch, my composure will fail.
“No,” she says finally, meeting my gaze directly. “I don’t regret marrying him, because it gave me you and your sister. But I deeply regret who I became when he left.”
I swallow hard, my throat tight. “You were hurt, Ma.”
“I was devastated,” she corrects gently.
“But that doesn’t excuse what I did or the pain I caused you and Hailey.
One of the steps in my program is making amends.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to approach it with you, but I think now is the time.
” She reaches across the table, her hand resting inches from mine.
“I am so sorry, Jenna. I took all my heartbreak, all my anger and humiliation, and I put all of that weight onto your shoulders.”
My vision blurs. I blink rapidly, refusing to let the tears fall. “You were just trying to prepare us. To protect us.”
“I was protecting myself,” she says, her voice thick with hard-won remorse.
“And in the process, I broke something in you. I taught you that love was a liability. That men would inevitably abandon you, and that the only way to survive was to never need anyone. I see it now. I see the damage I did, and I see it costing you a man like Dominic.”
“You don’t know him, Ma,” I say, the words slipping out defensive and sharp. I grip my damp hands together in my lap. “You never even met him.”
She doesn’t bristle. She doesn’t snap back. Instead, she looks at the folded dish towel, then back up at me. “He came to see me, Jenna.”
The kitchen tilts. My spine locks against the wooden back of the chair. “What?”
“It was a little over a month ago,” she says, her voice steady but steeped in shame. “I’m not sure of the exact date because I was . . . well, I was drinking. And I was not kind to him in the slightest. I said some truly awful things to try and run him off.”
My chest restricts. A little over a month ago . . . That would have been when we were in town helping Dustin. He’d said he had a meeting the day I had coffee with Hailey. Does that mean he came here? That my mother was his meeting?
“I was cruel,” she continues, her eyes shining now.
“But he didn’t leave. He just sat with me.
He sat right in that chair you’re in now, and he stayed long enough for me to run out of steam.
Then he spoke to me about you. He talked about all the incredible things he saw in you—your brilliance, your absolute refusal to quit.
But then he spoke about your fears. Your hurt.
The walls you put up so nobody could get close enough to leave you.
” She pauses, swallowing thickly. “And he looked me right in the eye, and he wondered if I saw it too.”
A jagged breath tears its way out of my throat. I dig my fingernails into my palms to anchor myself to the present, but the scaffolding of my composure is collapsing in real time.
“I’ll admit something to you I haven’t said out loud yet,” Ma whispers, reaching out to gently touch my wrist. “He’s actually the reason I went to AA.”
I stare at her, my corporate-honed brain failing to process the data. “Dominic?”
“Yes. Hearing this man who loved you so fiercely, who saw exactly how my damage had become your trauma . . . it broke through whatever delusion I was clinging to. I realized I didn’t want to keep hurting my girls. I couldn’t bear to be the reason you pushed away someone who saw you that clearly.”
The silence in the kitchen is absolute, save for the faint hum of the refrigerator.
He didn’t tell me.
Dominic Cruz, a man who monetizes leverage, who tracks every favor and calculates every angle, came to Queens.
He sat with my hostile, alcoholic mother, absorbed her cruelty, and quietly dismantled the root of my trauma—all without ever asking for credit.
He didn’t use it as a bargaining chip in our marriage.
He didn’t drop it into a conversation to prove his devotion. He just did it. Because he loved me.
I called him the boy in the car with the paintballs. I accused him of treating me like a challenge, like a prize to be won in front of an audience. Meanwhile, he was secretly traveling to the darkest, most broken corners of my past, trying to build a bridge I could walk across.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, fighting a losing battle against the sob rising in my throat. I was so convinced my rigid independence was strength. I was so sure I was protecting myself.
“Why . . .” I hiccup, needing to force myself to take a breath before I can speak again. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I sniff.
“I was ashamed,” Ma says simply. “And he asked me not to. He said you deserved to come to your own conclusions without him putting his thumb on the scale. He told me he just wanted to make sure that if you ever decided to look back, there was something worth seeing.”
I pull my hands away from my face, my skin damp and raw. The air in this kitchen feels different now—thinner, or maybe just cleaner. I look into the living room, where the annulment papers are sitting on the coffee table, waiting for me to feel brave enough to sign them too.
“When those papers came,” I whisper, my voice catching on the memory of my own hysteria, “you were so angry. You called him a bastard. You said he was just like Dad, discarding me the moment it got hard.”
Ma looks down at her hands, her wedding ring finger bare and pale. “I did say those things. And I meant them in the moment.”
“But you knew,” I say, a new kind of hurt blooming in my chest. “You knew he’d come here. You knew he’d tried. Why did you talk like he was the villain?”
Ma reaches across the table and covers my hand with hers. Her skin is warm, a little rough, and entirely steady.
“Because you were hurting, Jenna,” she says, her voice thick with a fierce, maternal gravity I haven’t felt in decades.
“If my daughter comes home with her heart in pieces, I’m going to take her side.
I don’t care if she’s right, or wrong, or somewhere in the messy middle.
I will burn every bridge in this city if it makes you feel like you have a safe place to land.
That’s what I should have done for you when your father left, and after those boys were so awful to you senior year. I’m doing it now.”
I choke back a sob, the weight of her unconditional defense hitting me harder than any of her previous criticisms ever could.
She isn’t just making amends; she’s rewriting the definition of love I’ve been using as a shield.
Love isn’t a liability. It’s a riot. It’s a quiet kitchen in Queens and a man who sits with a woman who wanted to hate him on sight, just so he could clear a path for someone who might never thank him.
The doorbell rings, followed by a frantic, rhythmic pounding that echoes through the house.
I drop my hands, startled. Ma frowns, wiping her eyes with her apron.
“Were you expecting another delivery?” she asks.
“No,” I say, my voice raw. But the knocking comes again, louder this time, accompanied by a muffled voice that sounds suspiciously like Serena’s.
I push my chair back. My pulse is a frantic, erratic drumbeat in my ears. The revelation about Dominic is still expanding in my chest, a supernova of guilt and awe.
“Jenna!” Serena’s voice filters through the cheap wood of the front door, confirming my suspicion. “Open the door before Audrey attempts a forced entry. She watched a YouTube tutorial on the flight.”
“I merely stated the theoretical mechanics of a bump key,” Audrey’s muffled, defensive voice chimes in.
I freeze in the hallway, swiping aggressively at my damp cheeks. I look back at Ma, who has followed me out of the kitchen, her brow furrowed in utter confusion.
“Friends from Chicago,” I manage to whisper, though the word friends feels entirely inadequate for the four women currently staging a siege on a porch in Queens.
I take a steadying breath, smooth my hands down my T-shirt, and unlock the deadbolt.
I pull the door open and find them standing in a formidable, impeccably dressed huddle.
Serena is at the front, wearing her signature red trench coat.
Layla is beside her, clutching a massive cardboard tray of coffees.
Nora looks fiercely protective, still wearing her navy jacket with the school crest on the breast pocket, and Audrey is wearing her usual pinafore dress while peering at the door hinges with genuine interest.
They look completely absurd on this cracked concrete stoop. They also look like a lifeline.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, my voice cracking on the second-to-last word.