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Thea
told her, more than once, that she didn’t need to send anything.
Josie sent it anyway.
“Let me do this. Mom,” she said. “You spent your whole life taking care of me. Let me take care of you now.”
Pregnancy & Maternity
The visits home never quite materialized, though.
Work got busy.
Flights got expensive.
There was always a reason, reasonable on its own. That added up over time into something Thea couldn’t quite name yet.
One year it was a major contract renewal that couldn’t wait. Another year, a flu that kept Josie in bed for two weeks straight, too weak to travel afterward. Each excuse sounded plausible in isolation. Thea only startednoticing the pattern once she’d heard enough of them stacked on top of each other.
By the third year, the calls grew less frequent.
By the fifth,
←the money arriving each Christmas had grown into something much larger.
Eighty
thousand dollars, wired every December, with the same short message attached.
Thea remembered the first time that larger number appeared, staring at her bank notification twice. Certain there had been some mistake before checking her email and finding Josie’s message waiting. Brief and reassuring as always. She never fully understood, backthen, how a company recovering from betrayal could suddenly be generating numbers that large. Though she told herself it simply meant success, nothing more complicated than that.
“Mom, don’t worry about me. Everything is good here.”
Thea kept every single message. Screenshots saved in a folder on her phone she looked through more often than she admitted to anyone.
Mobile Phones
She noticed, over the years, how the messages grew shorter.
How the video calls grew rarer, and stranger. Josie’s eyes drifting somewhere past the camera during
long stretches ofsilence.
Once, Thea asked directly if everything was alright, and Josie’s
answer came a beat too late. A pause just long enough to register before the reassurance arrived. “Everything’s fine, Mom,” she’d said. “Just tired. Work’s been a lot lately.” Thea had chosen to believe her. The way you choose to believe the people you love when the alternative feels too frightening to consider.
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“Work keeps me tied down, Mom,” Josie said, whenever Thea asked about visiting. “You know how it is.”
Thea didn’t know how itwas.
She’d never run a company, never lived overseas. Never understood exactly what kept a daughter from her own mother for over a decade straight.
