Mia POV
I make a rule at 6 a.m.
Standing in the bathroom of my childhood home, looking at my own face in the mirror with my toothbrush in my hand and my packed bag behind me on the floor, I make myself one promise: I will not cry today. Not in this house. Not in front of them. I will walk out of here with my face completely even, and I will fall apart somewhere private, somewhere that belongs to me, the moment I find a place that qualifies.
I just need to get through breakfast.
I can do breakfast.
I have survived twenty-three years in this family. I can survive one last meal.
My father is already at the table when I come downstairs.
He is sitting very straight in the way he does when he has prepared himself for something, tie on, coffee poured, hands folded on the table like he is about to chair a meeting. There is an envelope in front of him. White. Thick. My name is written on the front in his handwriting.
I know what it is before I sit down.
I sit down anyway, because leaving immediately would be the emotional response, and I have promised myself today is not about emotions. Today is about logistics. I can do logistics. I am, apparently, a logistics problem that needs solving, and I might as well help.
"I want to explain what's in there before you open it," he says.
"Okay."
"It's a check." He clears his throat. "The amount is"
"Is it fair?" I ask.
He blinks. "I'm sorry?"
"You used that word a lot yesterday. Fair." I look at the envelope. "Is it fair?"
A pause. "I believe it is more than."
"Then I don't need the explanation." I pick up the envelope. I do not open it. I hold it in both hands, and I look at my father, and I think: I know this man. I know the way he takes his coffee and the sound of his laugh and the particular crease between his eyebrows when he is worried. I have known him my whole life. And somewhere inside that knowing is the fact, new and sharp and not yet fully real, that he found out seven years ago. Not three weeks. Seven years. But I am not supposed to know that yet, so I keep that knowledge in a small, locked room inside myself, and I look at his face and I say nothing.
"There is also a fund," he says, pushing through the silence. "For your apartment. First and last month, and six months of living expenses after that, to give you time to find your footing. And your education funding continues, the account doesn't change."
I nod.
"And Mia." He reaches across the table. His hand stops halfway, like he lost his nerve. It just sits there on the tablecloth, not quite reaching me. "This family will always care about you. That doesn't stop because of."
"I know, Dad."
The word comes out before I can stop it. Dad. I have called him that ten thousand times. It sits in the air between us, and we both look at it, and neither of us knows what to do with it now.
His hand retreats.
My mother comes in from the kitchen with toast she has made because she always makes toast when she doesn't know what else to do. She sets a plate in front of me and one in front of my father, and then stands beside the table like she cannot decide whether to sit down or stay standing.
I look at her.
She looks at me for one second, full, direct, her eyes wet, and then looks at the table.
Two seconds later, she looks at me again. Then away.
She cannot hold my gaze for more than three seconds. I count. Every time she tries, something pulls her eyes sideways, down, anywhere else. I understand it. I do. Looking at me right now requires looking at every year of what she did and did not do, and that is a hard thing to look at directly. I understand it, and it still lands in my chest like something physical.
She is the woman who made my birthday cakes and wiped my tears and sat with me through fevers and heartbreaks. She is also the woman who chose, three weeks ago, when the results came back, to make a guest room into a bedroom instead of picking up the phone.
Both things are true. I do not know yet how to hold both things at the same time without one of them crushing the other.
I eat the toast. I drink the coffee. I keep my face even.
I am excellent at this.
Vivienne does not come down for breakfast.
I am grateful for this in a way I am not proud of. I could handle my parents. I could not have handled Vivienne at the breakfast table with her sharp, measuring eyes and her folded hands, watching me eat my last meal in my last morning, as if she were cataloguing everything she was inheriting.
I finish my coffee. I push back my chair. I stand up, and I pick up my bag.
My mother makes a sound small and involuntary, quickly swallowed.
I look at her. She finally holds my gaze, long enough to matter, and I see everything in it: the love, real and deep, and the guilt, and the grief, and underneath all of it, the terrible shape of her relief, which she is trying to hide and cannot. I see it all. I love her, and I am furious at her, and I am going to miss her every day, and I am not going to say any of that right now.
I walk around the table, and I hug her.
She hugs back immediately, both arms tight, the way she always has, and for one second, she smells like she always smells, and it is the most painful second of this entire morning. Her arms are shaking slightly. I think she might be crying. I keep my face turned away so I do not have to see.
The hug lasts five seconds.
I let go first.
I straighten up. I pick up my bag. I look at my father, who has stood up from his chair and is holding the envelope out to me. I take it. I put it in my jacket pocket without looking at it again.
"Thank you," I say.
They are the two most complicated words I have ever spoken.
I walk to the front door.
Lucian is blocking it.
Of course he is.
He is standing with his back to the door, hands in his pockets, in the suit he has clearly been in since early morning, and he looks at me the way he has been looking at me since I arrived, steady and direct and giving nothing away, and somehow, underneath all the stillness, giving everything away.
I stop in front of him.
"Move," I say.
"No."
"Lucian."
"Give me thirty seconds."
"I don't have thirty seconds. I have a cab coming in four minutes, and I need to"
"Twenty seconds."
I press my lips together. I look at the door behind him. The morning light is coming through the glass panel beside it, and it is a perfectly ordinary morning outside: birds, someone's car reversing out of a driveway two houses down, the neighbor's dog barking at something. The world is going about itself without any idea that mine has just been disassembled and handed back to me in an envelope.
"Twenty seconds," I say.
He reaches into his inside jacket pocket and takes out a business card. He holds it out. I look at it. It is his standard card, Shen Group, his title, the official number. But on the back, in his handwriting, blue ink, slightly pressed harder than necessary: a different number. Personal. The number I already have in my phone, have had for years, but seeing it written by hand like this is different somehow. It means he did this deliberately, this morning, before I came downstairs. He prepared.
He always prepares.
"You will call me," he says, "when you need help."
Not if. When.
"I won't need help."
"You will call me," he says again, exactly the same way, as if I did not speak. "When you need it. Not before. Not to check in. When you need it, you will call."
I look at the card. I look at him. I think about the photograph on the nightstand that I did not take with me, that I left in the room that is no longer mine. I think about his footsteps stopping outside my door last night. I think about every man who got close to me and then disappeared, and the person who was always nearby, and the look that has apparently been on his face for a decade.
I think about the word want and how it looked on someone who has never once in his life let himself want something he couldn't have.
I think I should not take this card. I have his number. I do not need a card. Taking this card means something, and I do not have the space right now to figure out what it means.
I take the card.
His hand doesn't move immediately. Just for one second, his fingers brush mine on the handoff, not on purpose, just contact, just the ordinary physics of passing something from one person to another. Brief and accidental and completely unremarkable.
My heart does something unremarkable, too.
I put the card in my pocket.
He steps aside.
I open the door. The morning air comes in, cool and ordinary and mine. I step through it. I do not look back because I know if I look back, his face will be doing the thing again, and I am not equipped for that right now. I have an envelope of money, a business card, one bag, and four minutes until my cab arrives.
I have everything I need.
I keep walking.
I make it exactly to the end of the driveway before I realize my hand is pressed flat against my jacket pocket, over the card, like I am keeping it warm.
I move my hand.
I keep walking.
The cab arrives in three minutes.
I do not cry.