Chapter 10
Hadley had the box open on the bed before she looked down and saw her hands shaking.
The cardboard had gone soft at the corners from being moved too many times and never fully unpacked, one of three boxes Marta had tucked into the back of the wardrobe the week Hadley and Ivy came to Tideview.
Winter scarves. Summer shoes. Maeve’s things.
Practical triage had sorted them fast enough to survive, and survival had done what it always did. It had disguised itself as management.
Morning light came through the Tideview curtains in a gray-pearl wash that dulled the room’s edges.
Ivy was still asleep in the narrow bed across from hers, one arm flung out from under the quilt, hair spread dark over the pillow.
Hadley stood with a folded cardigan in one hand and Maeve’s old leather wallet in the other, looking at the school form she’d set beside the lamp.
Mother’s full name.Mother’s date of birth.Emergency contact notes if deceased.
The form was not cruel. That would have been easier. It was ordinary.
Hadley set the wallet down too hard. Coins knocked inside it with a hard little crack.
From the bed, Ivy stirred. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Hadley said, too fast. She cleared her throat. “Sorry. I bumped something.”
Ivy pushed herself up on one elbow, the quilt slipping to her waist. Sleep still softened her face, but her eyes were already sharp. “Are we late?”
“No. We’re very impressively on time for people who haven’t had breakfast.”
Ivy sat up. “That’s because you packed my sweater last night.”
Hadley nearly laughed. Of course that was the explanation. Logistics. Preparation. The small altar where she had spent the last year worshipping instead of anything less manageable.
She folded the cardigan again without seeing it. Maeve’s birthday had entered the room and taken up space.
Ivy noticed the form on the bedspread and crawled closer. “Is that for school?”
“Yes.”
“Why’s my mom’s wallet out?”
Hadley kept her face still by habit. “I needed to check her old address.”
Ivy accepted this as perfectly reasonable administration. Then, because she was seven and grief never kept the sequence adults wanted, she asked, “Was today her birthday or is that next month?”
The question landed clean and low.
“Today,” Hadley said.
Ivy looked at the wallet for a long moment. “Are birthdays still birthdays if someone died?”
Hadley sat on the edge of the bed because standing suddenly seemed too ambitious. “I think they still count,” she said. “They just count differently.”
Ivy thought about that. “Do you think she liked chocolate cake more or lemon?”
Maeve had liked chocolate when she was tired, lemon when she was pretending she wasn’t.
Hadley could see her all at once: barefoot in their college kitchen, hair clipped up badly, stealing icing with a spoon and insisting she was only testing consistency.
Twenty-six and laughing too loudly at nothing because she had slept three hours and was determined to make a party happen anyway.
Thirty and quieter, one hand braced against the back of a chair while she said she was fine in the voice that meant she was not.
“Both,” Hadley said. “Depending on the year.”
Ivy drew her knees up. “What kind this year?”
It would have been easier if Maeve had been simple. Easier if absence turned people into saints. Instead it left the ordinary details exactly where they had always been, beloved and exasperating together.
“Chocolate,” Hadley said. “Because it’s raining.”
“Rain means chocolate?”
“For your mother, usually.”
Ivy nodded solemnly. Then, in the same careful voice, “Did she know my dad’s birthday?”
There it was. The second blade slipped under the first.
Hadley looked down at the form because paper was easier than a child’s face. “I think she did.”
“Then why didn’t she tell him about me sooner?”
No answer belonged in a morning like this. None small enough. None honest enough.
Hadley set the cardigan aside. “I don’t know all of it,” she said, and at least that was true. “Some of what grown-ups do when they’re scared makes very little sense later.”
Ivy frowned. “That sounds like when I hid the library book in my sock drawer.”
A broken laugh escaped Hadley before she could stop it. “A little,” she said. “Only with worse consequences and more paperwork.”
Ivy leaned against her shoulder. “Was she scared a lot?”
Hadley looked at the wardrobe door. “Sometimes.”
“Of what?”
Rent, maybe. Bad choices already made. Being needed too much. Joy asking something back from her.
“Of some things ending,” Hadley said. “And some things changing.”
Ivy absorbed that with the grave concentration she gave any answer that disappointed by being true. “Was she nice when she was scared?”
Hadley closed her eyes for one beat.
“No,” she said quietly. “Not always.”
Ivy was silent. Then she asked, in a voice so careful it hurt, “Was she still my mom when she was bad at things?”
Hadley turned and pulled Ivy fully against her, cardigan and form and wallet forgotten. Ivy came willingly, warm from sleep, all sharp elbows and trust.
“Yes,” Hadley said into her hair. “Absolutely yes.”
They stayed that way until the breakfast bell sounded faintly through the floorboards.
By the time they made it downstairs, Hadley had her face arranged.
Toast. Oatmeal. Matching socks. Hair braided.
Permission slip signed except for the one line she would fill in later, when her hand stopped feeling treacherous.
Ivy was engaged in a serious debate with Marta about whether marmalade was a preserve or an attitude.
Marta, ladling oatmeal with military authority, declared it could be both and slid an extra piece of toast onto Hadley’s plate without comment.
“Eat first,” Marta said. “Explain after.”
Hadley obeyed because gratitude would have been harder.
Cian arrived halfway through breakfast with rain darkening the shoulders of his jacket and a paper pharmacy bag tucked under one arm.
He paused just inside the doorway when he saw them, taking in the room the way he took in most things: completely, without making a performance of it. Ivy brightened at once.
“You’re early,” she said.
“That’s because you’re doctor-early, not regular-early,” Ivy added before he could answer herself, and Cian’s mouth moved at one corner.
Hadley kept her attention on her tea, but she felt his glance rest on her a fraction longer than courtesy required. Not intrusive. Not curious in the wrong way. Just attentive. She was beginning to understand that this might always be the most dangerous thing about him.
He set the pharmacy bag beside her plate. “The refill Marta asked me to pick up.”
“Thank you.”
Marta sniffed. “Competence improves nearly everyone. Sit down before the oatmeal develops principles.”
Cian sat. Ivy launched into a report on the weather, school, and the moral failures of one classmate who sharpened pencils theatrically. Hadley answered when she had to, buttered toast she did not want, and kept the day stitched together with both hands.
She managed it until midafternoon, when the late papers came home from school in a bent packet from the classroom cubby.
The teacher had sent home a birthday memory project from last term. Draw your family tree. Write three things your mother loves. Include one favorite song.
Ivy sat cross-legged on the rug with a crayon in each hand and asked, “Did Mom hate onions for real or just say that?”
Hadley was on the floor by the low table, sorting laundry because folded things were still more useful than any coping exercise anyone had ever printed on pastel paper.
“For real,” she said. “Unless they were cooked long enough to disappear.”
“And what was her song?”
Hadley’s hands stopped over one of Ivy’s socks.
Maeve had never had one song. She had weeks of songs.
Entire seasons of them. Songs for dancing while she chopped vegetables badly.
Songs for crying in the car where no one could see.
Songs for scrubbing the kitchen at midnight with wild determination, because perhaps if the counters shone, the rest of life might follow.
“She changed her mind a lot,” Hadley said.
“That’s not helpful.”
“No,” Hadley said. “Sorry. Let me think.”
Ivy drew a lopsided tree in hard green strokes. “What if I get it wrong?”
The sock in Hadley’s hand blurred.
“You won’t,” she said, and heard the force in it at once. Ivy looked up. Hadley made herself start again. “There isn’t one right answer.”
Ivy set the crayon down. “You sound mad.”
“I’m not mad at you.”
“Then who?”
That was the question, wasn’t it.
Hadley stood too quickly. The laundry basket tipped into the dresser. Socks spilled over the floorboards.
Ivy’s face changed. Not fear exactly. Readiness. The old kind.
Hadley saw it and hated herself on sight.
She crouched again immediately. “Hey. No. I’m sorry.” She took Ivy’s ink-smudged hand between both of hers. “This isn’t you. I’m having a bad hour.”
Ivy searched her face. “Because of her birthday?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to stop asking?”
That undid her more than the questions had.
“No,” Hadley whispered. “I just need to catch my breath, or I’ll answer badly.”
A knock sounded on the open doorframe, light enough to count as a question.
Reverend Tamsin Quill stood there in her raincoat, the edges of her knit cap damp, one hand already halfway into a pocket where peppermints almost certainly lived.
She took in the crayons, the laundry, Ivy’s watchful posture, Hadley’s failing composure, and made none of it dramatic.
“I was dropping off foundation forms for Marta,” she said. “And I happen to have peppermints. Remarkable coincidence.”
Ivy held out a hand at once.
Tamsin gave her two, then looked at Hadley. “Walk with me a minute?”
Hadley should have said no. She had a form to finish and dinner to think about and a child drawing a family tree in which every branch now felt accusatory. Instead she heard herself say, “I’m just going downstairs.”