Chapter 9: The Morning After
I stayed one more night.
Graham asked me to.
Bianca didn't object.
That, by itself, felt like something.
In the morning I came downstairs to find Oliver already at the table with a bowl of cereal he had made himself.
He looked up when I came in.
"I can reach the mugs now," he said.
"I know," I said.
"I put them there."
He grinned and went back to his cereal.
Maisie came down twenty minutes later and asked if we could make pancakes.
Bianca was still upstairs.
I looked at the clock, then at the pantry.
"Go get the flour," I said.
We were halfway through the batter when Bianca appeared in the doorway.
She looked at the flour on the counter.
The bowl.
The two of us at the stove.
"Is there enough for four?" she asked.
Maisie looked at me.
"There's enough for five," I said.
"Go get another egg from the fridge."
Bianca got the egg.
She didn't take over.
She didn't assign anything.
She stood at the counter and cracked the egg into the bowl when I asked her to, and she watched Maisie stir with the kind of attention that meant she was trying to be present, not just nearby.
Graham came down to the smell of butter in the pan.
He stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked at all of us.
"Nobody told me there were pancakes."
"We just decided," Maisie said.
He sat down.
We ate at the kitchen table, all five of us, with the last jar of strawberry jam open in the middle.
Oliver got jam on his shirt.
Maisie stacked three pancakes and called it a tower.
Graham refilled my coffee without being asked.
Bianca cut her pancakes into small pieces and didn't say much.
But she was there.
Fully there, not on her phone, not looking past the table at something else.
After breakfast, I washed my cup and dried it and set it back in the cabinet.
Bianca watched me.
"You don't have to do that," she said.
"I know," I said.
"I wanted to."
She nodded.
I packed my bag upstairs.
Maisie's drawing went in first, carefully folded between two shirts so it wouldn't crease.
The notebook went in next.
I didn't need it anymore, but I kept it.
Graham carried my bag to the car.
Maisie hugged me at the front door for a long time.
Oliver shook my hand very formally, then changed his mind and hugged me too.
Bianca stood on the step.
"Drive safe," she said.
"I will."
A pause.
"Eleanor." She said it the same way she had in the garden.
Like she was still getting used to it.
"Come back.
When you want to.
Not because we need you to." She looked at the children, then back at me.
"Just because."
I looked at my son's wife.
Thirty-one years old.
Still learning.
Trying, now, in a way she hadn't been before.
"I will," I said.
I drove the first hour without the radio on.
Not because I was upset.
Because the quiet felt different this time.
Not like something I was carrying.
Like something I had set down.
---
*Some people come into our lives to take.
Some come to give.
And sometimes, the ones who hurt us most are the ones who needed someone to show them the difference.*
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