26. Adriana #2
Six months in, I start thinking about what comes next.
Not in a panicked way. Not the way I used to think about the future, like a train coming at me too fast. Just wondering. Imagining. Letting myself want things.
I liked school more than I expected to. The semester I just finished was supposed to be a trial run, a few general classes to see if I could even do it.
I can. And now I want more than a few scattered classes.
I want the real thing, a degree, a subject I choose because it matters to me and not because my father picked it to look good at a dinner party.
I tell Enzo about it one night. We’re in bed, his hand tracing lazy patterns on my back, the city glittering through the window.
“What would you study?” he asks.
“I don’t know yet. Maybe psychology. Or social work. Something where I could help people who are stuck the way I was stuck.”
“You’d be good at that.”
“You think?”
“I think you understand what it’s like to feel trapped. To feel like you don’t have choices. That kind of understanding, you can’t teach it. You can only live it.”
I roll over to face him. “It would take years. And it’s expensive.”
“I can…”
“No.”
He pauses. “You didn’t let me finish.”
“You were going to offer to pay.”
“I was going to offer to help.”
“Same thing.”
“It’s not.” He props himself up on an elbow. “I know you need to do things yourself. I know that’s important to you. But accepting help isn’t the same as being dependent. You can be strong and still let someone support you.”
“Easy to say when you’re the one with the money.”
“Fair.” He’s quiet a moment. “What if it was a loan?”
“A loan.”
“You pay me back. With interest, if that makes you feel better. We do paperwork, set terms, make it real. That way it’s yours, earned, not handed to you.”
I don’t know what to say. He’s trying so hard to meet me where I am. To understand the difference between helping and controlling. Between supporting and smothering.
“I’ll think about it,” I say finally.
“That’s all I’m asking.”
He kisses my forehead, and I tuck myself against his chest, and I think about it. About pride, and independence, and what it means to let someone in without losing yourself.
I’m still figuring it out. But at least now I have time to figure.
***
Spring turns to summer.
We develop routines. Morning coffee, him reading the news while I check my email. Evening walks when the weather’s good. Sundays at the farmer’s market, where I make him try things he claims to hate and then watch him admit they’re actually good.
“You’re smug,” he says, after the third time this happens.
“I’m right. There’s a difference.”
“You’re smugly right.”
“That’s the best kind of right.”
He buys me flowers from the market, not the expensive ones from the florist, just whatever catches his eye. Sunflowers one week. Daisies the next. A bunch of wildflowers the vendor swears will last but are wilting by Tuesday.
I keep them anyway. Even the dead ones.
“You’re a hoarder,” he says, watching me refuse to throw out a vase of brown petals.
“I’m sentimental.”
“You’re sentimentally a hoarder.”
I throw a dead flower at him. He catches it, tucks it behind his ear, and makes dinner with it still there.
I love him so much it scares me sometimes.
***
It’s a weekday afternoon in late June when my phone rings.
I’m at the library, the campus one this time, at the same community college I’ve been at since spring.
I registered for fall a few weeks after that conversation with Enzo, except this time I declared toward an actual degree instead of just picking classes that looked interesting.
I’m surrounded by course catalogs and financial aid forms, highlighter in hand, trying to map out what the next two years might look like.
I almost don’t answer. I don’t recognize the number, and I’m in the middle of something. But I pick up anyway.
“Hello?”
Silence on the other end. Then a voice I haven’t heard in almost a year.
“Adriana?”
My mother.
I freeze. The highlighter slips from my fingers, rolls across the table, drops to the floor. I don’t pick it up.
“Adriana, are you there?”
“I’m here.” My voice comes out thin. Like someone else is using it. “How did you get this number?”
“Your friend. Amelia. I asked her to…” She stops. Takes a breath that sounds ragged. “I know I don’t have any right to call. I know what your father did. What I let him do. What I…” Her voice breaks. “But I need to talk to you. Please.”
I should hang up. I should tell her it’s too late, that she made her choice when she stood by and watched my father sell me off, that I don’t owe her anything. That she’s not my mother anymore, not really, not in any way that counts.
But she sounds like she’s been crying for hours.
And she’s still my mother.
“What do you want?” I ask.
“I left him.” The words come out in a rush. “I finally left. After everything, after you, after what he did to you, after I finally saw what he really is…” Another ragged breath. “I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t be that person anymore. The one who just watches. Who lets things happen.”
“You actually left him? After thirty years?”
“Last week. I’m staying at my family’s old house. The one my grandmother left me.” She pauses. “I’d forgotten I even had it. Your father always said it was worthless, not worth keeping up. But it’s mine. It’s always been mine. He couldn’t touch it.”
Something loosens in my chest. She’s not on the street. She’s not penniless. She has a place of her own.
“I want to see you,” she says. “I want to explain. I know I don’t deserve it, but…”
“Where are you now?”
“I came into the city today. I’m at a hotel. I was hoping…” She trails off. “I was hoping you might be willing to meet me.”
I close my eyes. Think about all the years she could have protected me and didn’t. All the times she looked away. All the silence she chose.
Then I think about what it must have taken for her to leave. To walk out of the only life she’d known for thirty years. To pick up the phone and call a daughter who has every reason to hang up.
“I’ll be there in an hour,” I say.
She gives me the name of the hotel, somewhere upscale, a place she’d have stayed back when she was still my father’s wife. Old habits.
“Adriana,” she says, before I can hang up. “Thank you. For even considering it.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I don’t know what this is.”
I hang up. Sit there a long moment, staring at the course catalogs that suddenly seem very far away.
Then I call Enzo.
He picks up on the first ring. “Hey. Everything okay?”
“My mother just called.”
Silence. He’s waiting, not pushing.
“She left my father,” I say. “She’s at a hotel in the city. She wants to meet.”
“What do you need?”
Not what are you going to do. Not are you sure that’s a good idea. Just: what do you need.
“I think I need to go see her. But I don’t know what I’m going to say. I don’t know what I’m going to feel.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“Yes. But I need to talk to her alone first. Can you just be nearby? In case I need you?”
“I’ll wait in the lobby. However long it takes.”
“Thank you.”
“Always. I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”
***
The hotel is nicer than I expected.
Not flashy. My mother was never flashy. But quietly expensive, the place where the staff knows not to ask questions and the lobby smells like fresh flowers and money.
Enzo pulls up to the entrance and cuts the engine. Neither of us moves.
“Room 712,” I say. “She texted me.”
“I’ll be right here.” He reaches over, takes my hand. “Call me if you need me. Text me. Anything.”
“I will.”
“And Ana?” He waits until I look at him. “You don’t owe her anything. Just because she left him, that doesn’t mean you have to forgive her. That doesn’t mean you have to let her back in.”
“I know.”
“Whatever you decide, it’s your call. Not hers. Not mine. Yours.”
I squeeze his hand. “I know.”
He kisses my knuckles. “Go. I’ll be here.”
I get out of the car. Walk through the lobby, into the elevator, watch the numbers climb. The doors open.
Room 712 is at the end of the hall. I stand outside a moment, hand raised to knock.
This is my mother. The woman who raised me. The woman who failed me.
I knock.
She opens the door almost immediately.
She looks different. That’s my first thought. Not terrible, she’s dressed well, put-together the way she’s always been put-together. But she’s changed. There’s a tightness around her eyes. The way she holds herself, like she’s not sure she’s allowed to take up space.
She looks like a woman who’s finally stopped pretending.
“Adriana.” My name comes out like a prayer. “You came.”
“I came.”
She steps back, and I walk into the room. It’s a suite, spacious, a view of the park. She can afford this. She’s not desperate.
But she’s still alone.
“Can I…” She gestures helplessly. “Do you want something? Tea? Coffee?”
“I’m fine.”
“Of course. Of course.” She wrings her hands. “Please, sit. I have so much to say.”
We sit. Her on the edge of the sofa, me in the armchair across from her. A few feet between us that feels like years.
“I don’t know where to start,” she says.
“Start with why you left.”
She’s quiet a moment. Gathering herself. When she speaks, her voice is steadier.
“After the wedding. After you walked out. I kept waiting for you to come back. Your father said you would. Said you’d realize you had nowhere to go, that you’d come crawling back eventually. I believed him.” She looks down at her hands. “I always believed him.”
“But I didn’t come back.”
“No. You didn’t.” A ghost of a smile. “And then I heard, through people, through gossip, that you were living somewhere else. That you had a life. That you were happy.” She looks up at me. “I kept thinking, how? How did she do that? How did she walk away from everything and just survive?”
“It wasn’t easy.”