23. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
I’m waiting at the arrivals gate with coffee I’m too nervous to drink, watching the automatic doors slide open and closed, scanning every face that emerges.
Business travelers with rolling suitcases.
Families reuniting with shrieks and hugs.
A tired-looking woman herding three children toward baggage claim.
And then there she is.
Karla looks exactly the same as she did six months ago, the last time I saw her: silver-streaked hair pulled back in her practical ponytail, reading glasses perched on top of her head, wearing the same denim jacket she’s owned since I was in middle school.
She’s smaller than I remember, somehow. Or maybe I’ve just gotten used to feeling small, and seeing her reminds me what it’s like to have someone in my corner.
“Baby.” She drops her bag and pulls me into a hug before I can say anything. Her arms wrap around me, strong and sure, and she smells like the lavender soap she’s used my whole life. “Oh, baby. I’m here. I’m here now.”
I don’t cry. I’ve done enough crying this week to last a lifetime. But I hold on longer than I mean to, letting myself be small for just a moment, letting her be the mother I’ve needed.
“Let me look at you.” She pulls back, holding me at arm’s length, studying my face with the critical eye only mothers have. “You look tired. Have you been sleeping?”
“Not really.”
“Eating?”
“When I remember.”
She makes a disapproving sound and picks up her bag. “First thing we’re doing is getting a proper breakfast into you. Then you’re taking me to this apartment of yours. I want to see what my daughter’s built.”
The diner near my apartment serves exactly the breakfast Mom approves of: eggs and toast and bacon, nothing fancy, just fuel. She watches me eat like she used to when I was a kid refusing vegetables, nodding with satisfaction when I clean my plate.
“Better,” she says. “Now. Tell me everything.”
I give her the short version while we walk to my building, filling in the parts she couldn’t hear through the phone. The look on Violet’s face when the last lie came apart. Cameron stepping between us like a wall. The quiet after, when the adrenaline wore off and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
“Good,” Mom says when I finish. “She got what she deserved.”
“It doesn’t change what he did.”
“No. It doesn’t.” She squeezes my arm as we turn onto my street. “But it does mean you can stop wondering if there was more you didn’t know about. The other woman was never real. Just a sad, desperate person who wanted something she couldn’t have.”
My building isn’t much to look at from the outside: red brick, a little shabby, a place that doesn’t try to impress anyone. But it’s mine. I paid the deposit with money I earned. I signed the lease with my own name, no Jasper anywhere on the paperwork.
“Third floor,” I say as we take the stairs. “There’s an elevator, but it’s older than both of us and slower than walking. Sorry.”
“I’ve got two good legs. I can manage three flights.”
I unlock the door and hold my breath as she steps inside.
The apartment is small. A kitchen that bleeds into a living room, a bedroom barely big enough for my bed and a dresser, a bathroom with a shower so narrow I have to turn sideways to shave my legs.
Half-unpacked boxes still line the walls, books I haven’t shelved, clothes I haven’t hung, pieces of my old life waiting to become part of my new one.
But the morning light streams through the east-facing windows, warm and golden. The coffee maker Summer gave me sits on the counter, gleaming and ridiculous. My laptop is open on the kitchen table, surrounded by notes for the next software update.
Mom walks through slowly, taking it all in. She runs her hand along the kitchen counter. Looks out the window at the view of the street below. Picks up a framed photo I’d forgotten I’d unpacked, her and me at my college graduation, both of us grinning like idiots.
“This is yours,” she says finally. “Really yours. You built this.”
“It’s not much.”
“It’s everything.” She sets down the photo and turns to face me. “You walked away from a mansion to live in a third-floor apartment with boxes for furniture. You know what that takes? That takes backbone. That takes knowing who you are.”
My throat tightens. “I don’t know who I am. That’s the problem. I don’t know anything anymore.”
“Then let’s figure it out together.” She moves to the kitchen and starts opening cabinets. “Where do you keep your tea?”
I watch her navigate my tiny kitchen, finding the kettle, the tea bags, the mugs I bought at a thrift store because I couldn’t stomach using the ones from the old house.
She moves with the efficiency of a woman who’s made tea in a thousand kitchens, who learned to make do with whatever was available because that’s what single mothers do.
The water boils. She pours it over the tea bags with the same careful attention she brought to everything when I was growing up: checking my homework, braiding my hair, sitting with me through the long nights when the words wouldn’t stay still on the page and I was convinced I was stupid.
She never let me believe that. Not once.
“Here.” She sets a mug in front of me and takes the seat across the table. “Now. Tell me what you’re really thinking. Not the summary. The real thing.”
I wrap my hands around the warm ceramic and stare into the tea.
“I don’t know what to do,” I admit. “After everything, the broadcast, Violet, all of it, I still don’t know.
Part of me wants to believe he’s changed.
Part of me is terrified that wanting to believe is just weakness.
And part of me is so tired of feeling anything at all that I just want it to be over, one way or the other. ”
“That’s three parts. Which one’s the loudest?”
I think about it. Really think, the way I haven’t let myself think since this whole nightmare started.
“The tired one,” I say finally. “I’m so tired, Mom. I’m tired of being angry. I’m tired of being hurt. I’m tired of waiting for the next disaster, the next betrayal, the next thing that proves I was stupid to hope.”
“That’s not weakness, baby. That’s exhaustion.
There’s a difference.” She reaches across the table and takes my hand, her fingers rough and warm.
“You’ve been fighting for so long. Fighting to be seen, fighting to be heard, fighting to prove you’re worth something. It makes sense that you’re tired.”
“So what do I do?”
“That’s not for me to say. Only what I see.”
“Then tell me what you see.”
She takes a breath, considering her words carefully.
“I see a man who humiliated you. Neglected you. Made you feel small when he should have made you feel like the center of his world.” She squeezes my hand.
“But I also see a man who quit his company. Who stood up on national television and took responsibility for every failure, every mistake, every way he let you down. Who spent months proving he could change instead of just promising he would.”
“What if he can’t keep it up? What if I take him back and it all falls apart again?”
“It might.” Her voice is gentle but honest. “Love is always a risk. Your father taught me that.”
“Dad was never really ours to lose.”
Something sad flickers across her face, old pain surfacing for a moment before she smooths it away.
“No. He wasn’t. He made his choice before you were even born, and we lived with the consequences.
But that’s not what this is, Hannah. Cameron isn’t your father.
He didn’t choose someone else. He chose work, and that was wrong, but it’s not the same betrayal. ”
“It felt like betrayal.”
“I know it did. I know.” She lifts my hand and presses her lips to my knuckles, the way she used to when I was little and scraped my knee.
“But giving someone another chance doesn’t make you weak.
Sometimes it just means you’re choosing hope.
And with love comes faith, trusting that they’ll try to deserve it. ”
“What if I can’t trust him?”
“Then you can’t. And that’s okay too. But you won’t know until you try.
” She sets my hand down gently. “The question isn’t whether you can live without him, baby.
You’ve already proven you can. You built a company.
Faced down your bullies. Showed everyone, including him, that you don’t need Cameron Jasper to survive. ”
She pauses, holding my gaze.
“The question is whether you want to.”
I sit with that. Let it settle into me like the tea warming my hands.
Do I want to live without him?
I think about the blackout, his voice in the dark, the almost-kiss that shattered when I pulled away. The fear in his eyes and the hope underneath it.
I think about the office at two in the morning, both of us exhausted, him reading my speech aloud because he remembered that I process better by listening. The way he didn’t try to fix me or change me, just worked with how my brain actually works.
I think about the lobby last night, the way he stepped between me and Violet without hesitation, shielding me from someone who wanted to hurt me. The way he took my hand afterward and didn’t let go until I pulled away.
I think about dancing barefoot in our kitchen, years ago, with the smoke from the ruined pasta still clearing above us. The way he looked at me like I was the only person in the world who mattered.
I think about years of empty dinners and missed calls and the slow, quiet death of feeling seen.
“I don’t know if I can forgive him,” I say finally. “I want to. But I don’t know if I can.”
“That’s okay.” Mom leans back in her chair, cradling her own tea. “Forgiveness isn’t a feeling, Hannah. It’s a choice. And you don’t have to make it until you’re ready. Maybe not even then.”
We sit in silence for a while, drinking our tea, letting the morning light shift across the table. For the first time in months, the silence doesn’t feel heavy. It just feels like rest.
“Thank you,” I say eventually. “For coming. For listening. For not telling me what to do.”
“I raised you to make your own decisions. I’m not about to stop trusting you now.”
The buzzer sounds.
We both startle, tea sloshing in our mugs. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Summer’s at work. The building doesn’t get many visitors.
Mom stands and crosses to the intercom. Presses the button. “Hello?”
A voice comes through, tinny and distorted but unmistakable.
“It’s Cameron. I know I said I’d wait. Please. I need to see her.”
Mom doesn’t answer right away. She presses the button again. “And why should she come down?”
A pause. Static. Then his voice, rougher: “Tell her what’s in my jacket pocket. Her ring. Tell her I’ve been carrying it since she left. Tell her it’s her call. It was always her call.”
Mom looks at me. I look at the intercom, at the small speaker that’s carrying my husband’s voice into my apartment.
“Hannah.” Mom’s voice is careful. “What do you want me to tell him?”
I don’t answer. I just walk to the window and look down.
He’s standing on the sidewalk in the pouring rain. I hadn’t even noticed it was raining. The sound must have been lost in our conversation, in the warmth of the apartment and the safety of my mother’s presence.
He’s soaked through. His suit is ruined, plastered to his body, his hair streaming water down his face. In one hand, he’s holding the divorce papers. I can see them even from three floors up, crumpled and damp. In the other hand, a pen.
He’s looking up at my window like he can see me through the glass.
Mom comes to stand beside me. We watch him together for a long moment.
“He must have been out there a long while before he buzzed,” she says quietly. “Look at him. He’s drenched.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. But those papers are soaked through. That takes time.”
I press my hand to the glass. It’s cold from the rain.
“He’s got something in his jacket pocket,” Mom says. “He told me when I answered the buzzer. Asked me to tell you.”
“What is it?”
She takes a moment before answering.
“Your wedding ring, baby. He’s been carrying it since you left.”
My breath catches.
“He says it’s your call.” She puts her hand on my shoulder. “He says it was always your call.”
I stand there for a long moment, watching my husband stand in the rain, waiting for me to decide his fate. Our fate. The fate of everything we built and broke and might still salvage from the wreckage.
Then I turn away from the window.
I take the stairs two at a time.