LARK #2
“I think the best thing you can do is negotiate with Boone. Find a middle ground. Handle this without getting a lawyer involved.”
I blink at her. “Negotiate?”
“Yes.”
“What, so Boone all of a sudden gets him on weekends or something? Hell no.”
Miller shrugs. “I mean, that’s a good start.”
I scoff, setting my glass down harder than necessary. “Miller, I—” I pause, shaking my head. “I don’t think I can do that.”
She crosses her legs. “Then why are we even having this conversation?”
I press my lips together, because I know she’s right. I’m asking for solutions while shutting down the only ones that make sense.
But I can’t imagine it.
The house without Hudson. The quiet pressing in, the absence of his voice filling the space.
What would I even do with myself on the weekends?
Wake up and drink coffee without him at the counter flipping through his baseball magazines?
Cook dinner without him stealing bites straight from the pan?
Watch TV without him stretched out on the couch, legs hanging off the side because he’s getting too damn tall?
What happens when I reach for his lunchbox in the mornings and remember I don’t need to pack one because he’s not here?
I shake the thought from my head. “It would feel like a piece of me is out in the world without me.” My voice cracks slightly, and I hate it.
Miller’s face softens. “I know.”
My throat burns, tears stinging my eyes. “I don’t think I can do that.”
Miller sets her glass down and reaches over, placing a steady hand on my knee. “But, Lark,” she says gently, “Hudson has a dad. A dad he should get to know.”
I tense.
Miller tilts her head. “Hasn’t he ever asked about Boone?”
I breathe sharply through my nose. “He used to. When he was little. When he was in school and all the other kids made Father’s Day cards and he didn’t have anyone to make one for.”
Miller doesn’t say anything, just listens.
“He’d ask why the other kids had dads and he didn’t,” I continue, swallowing hard.
“And I’d tell him that some families look different.
That he had me, and Aunt Alice, and Aunt Miller, and all the people in this town who loved him.
That family doesn’t always mean a mom and a dad, that sometimes it means a mom who loves you so much she’d do anything for you. And I still believe that.”
Miller’s quiet for a long beat, then says, “And when he got older?”
I let out a slow breath. “He just…stopped asking.”
“But I bet he still wonders,” she says softly.
The thought makes my stomach clench. Because if that’s true, if Hudson does still wonder, it means I haven’t been enough.
I’ve tried my damn hardest. I’ve done everything in my power to give him a life that feels whole, a life that doesn’t feel like something is missing. But what if it wasn’t enough?
What if I wasn’t enough ?
Miller squeezes my knee. “Don’t do that.”
I blink, pulling myself out of my thoughts. “Do what?”
She gives me a knowing look. “Retreat. Fold in on yourself like you do.”
I open my mouth to argue, but she cuts me off. “You’re a good mom, Lark. One of the very best.”
The lump in my throat grows.
“But you can’t be both.” She shakes her head. “You can’t be mom and dad. No matter how much you try.”
I know she’s right.
I loved my dad more than anything. He was my whole world.
He’s the one who taught me how to ride a horse—not just sit there and hang on for dear life, but really ride. Reins in my hands, back straight, eyes forward like I knew what I was doing. I didn’t. Not even close. But he made me feel like I could handle it. Like I could handle anything.
He taught me how to skip rocks across the lake, how to line up a BB gun and knock down tin cans like I was some kind of sharpshooter. How to sneak marshmallows into my hot chocolate when Alice wasn’t looking—two if I was lucky, three if he distracted her for me.
He showed me how to climb the oak trees behind the barn without catching my jeans, how to swing so high my stomach would drop and I’d scream, then do it all over again.
How to spit sunflower seeds like I’d been doing it my whole life.
He made everything seem easy. Like I could do all these little reckless things and not break.
He’s the one who convinced me Oreos are better with peanut butter. That cheating at poker’s not really cheating if you win. That the Big Dipper’s always there—you just have to look up.
He was everything.
But deep down, I still wanted a mom.
I never said it out loud, but I used to get jealous as hell when the girls at school would talk about theirs.
How they’d go shopping together, bake cookies, argue over curfews, watch ridiculous rom-coms and cry over the same predictable endings.
I even envied the ones who rolled their eyes and said their mom was being so annoying —because at least they had one to be annoyed with.
I wanted that. I wanted someone to teach me how to braid my hair without yanking half of it out. Someone to help me pick out a prom dress and tell me which makeup didn’t make me look like a raccoon. Someone to give me advice on boys and love and how to get over it when it all fell apart.
My dad did his best. But there were just some things he couldn’t be.
And maybe, no matter how much I love Hudson, there are some things I can’t be for him either.
“Think of it like this,” Miller says as she watches me, “If you were sitting here right now, talking to twenty-five-year-old Hudson, and he knew you had the chance to help him get to know his dad but didn’t, what do you think he’d say to you?”
I know exactly what that would look like.
He’d be upset. Maybe even furious. He’d want to know why I kept something this big from him, why I never gave him the option.
And he’d be hurt. Because what if, deep down, he’s always wanted to know?
What if he’s spent years wondering about the man who gave him his nose, his freckles, his jawline, the way he grips a baseball?
I swallow hard. “I don’t know.”
Miller shrugs, swirling the last of her wine in her glass. “And maybe he won’t care. Maybe he won’t have any desire to know Boone. But that should be his choice, not yours.”
I lean my head back against the couch again, closing my eyes. The wine is hitting harder now, a warmth settling in my limbs, loosening the last bit of resistance I have left. I don’t want to admit it, but she’s right. It should be Hudson’s choice.
I just don’t know if I’m ready to face what happens after.
Miller glances at her phone and stands, pressing a kiss to the top of my head like she used to back when we were kids sneaking into each other’s bedrooms to talk about boys and the latest high school gossip. “I gotta run.”
I crack one eye open. “Where are you going at—” I check the time. “— twelve-thirty in the morning?”
She grins, grabbing her bag. Designer, of course. “Remember that hot guy from the farmer’s market last month?”
I squint at her. “You gave some random man my address at midnight?”
She rolls her eyes. “Of course not. I gave him the address of the house down the street.”
I laugh, shaking my head. “You’re a menace.”
She grins. “You love me.”
“Jury’s still out.”
“You’re going to be okay, you know,” she says, more serious this time. “You’ll figure it out. You always do.”
I nod, but I don’t feel convinced. I watch the door click shut behind her, the quiet settling around me like a blanket. I don’t know what I’d do without Miller.
She’s been showing up for me since the second I told her I was pregnant—and not in some big, dramatic way either. In quiet, relentless ways. In Miller ways.
When I was twenty, working back-to-back shifts, running on three hours of sleep and half a granola bar, she’d let herself into my apartment on Saturday mornings like she paid rent.
No knock. No text. Just her, a giant iced coffee in one hand and Hudson in the other before I could even blink.
She’d order takeout, fold my laundry, wipe down my counters while complaining about the state of my fridge—and she never cooked.
Still doesn’t. Miller treats DoorDash like oxygen.
If the app ever crashed, she’d simply cease to exist.
And that’s the thing about Miller. She hates children.
Loathes anything that even hints at domestic responsibility.
She’s the woman who said she’d rather serve time in federal prison than change a diaper and meant it.
The kind of person who side-eyes babies on planes and visibly recoils if a child sneezes in her vicinity.
And caretaking? It’s about as far from her natural inclinations as the moon.
Yet, when Hudson was a tiny, inconsolable storm of colic, it was Miller who held him for hours.
She walked the floor in the dead of night.
She’d hum tuneless melodies, her brow furrowed in concentration, a fierce protectiveness etched on her face.
And in the blurry aftermath of sleepless nights and overwhelming days, when I’d find myself down on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, a raw, unraveling mess of doubt and tears, Miller was always there.
She never offered platitudes or easy answers—just a quiet, unwavering solidarity that whispered, you are not navigating this alone.
Miller doesn’t inherently love the sticky fingers or the endless demands of motherhood. But her love for me— and by extension, for this small, demanding human who has irrevocably changed my world—is a force of its own; a quiet, steadfast current that flows beneath the surface of her sharp edges.
And even though she’ll never admit it, she’s been taking care of us in her own weird, Miller way ever since. She’s trying to do that now, but I just don’t know what to do with it.
If Boone wanted Hudson on the weekends, where would they even go? The ranch? Boone worked the ranch—at least, he used to. And if he does, would Hudson be left with Molly? But Molly probably works the ranch too, especially since Lane’s been gone.
Lane.