She stopped asking directly.
She learned to accept the calls for what they were instead of pushing for what she wanted them to be.
Neighbors asked questions sometimes, curious about the daughter
who’d married rich and disappeared.
“She must be living the good life,” they’d say, admiring Thea’s new
furniture. The small renovations the money had slowly funded over the years.
Mrs. Patterson next doormentioned it almost every time they spoke at the mailbox. Half curious, half envious, never quite realizing how much the comment stung. Thea started timing her mail pickups to avoid the conversation entirely. Embarrassed by a happiness she couldn’t actually confirm was real.
Thea smiled and let them believe it.
She didn’t know, herself, whether it was true or not.
What she did know was the ache that settled into her chest every December. Setting a plate at her table for a daughter who wouldn’t be using it.
Twelve Christmasespassed that way.
On the thirteenth, something in Thea finally refused to accept another quiet, distant holiday.
She’d spent the twelfth Christmas alone in a way that
felt different from all the ones before it, the silence in her house pressing harder than usual.
The single plate at the table looking less like a hopeful gesture. And more like a habit she was afraid to break. She sat with that feeling for weeks afterward, turning it over. Until something in her finally hardened into decision instead of just longing.
She’dbeen saving a little money herself, tucked away over the years. Enough now for a plane ticket she’d never quite let herself buy before.
She bought it that November, on impulse, before she could talk herself out of it.
She didn’t tell Josie.
Some part of her wanted to see, honestly and without warning. Exactly what her daughter’s life actually looked like.
The flight was long, longer than she remembered flights being decades earlier.
She hadn’t flown anywhere significant since Josie’s own childhood. A family trip to
wasn’t.
It openedeasily under her hand. Swinging inward onto a house that felt wrong the
moment she stepped through it.
The living room looked staged, magazine-perfect, untouched by actual living.
No shoes by the door.
No coats thrown carelessly over furniture.
No smell of cooking, or perfume, or anything that suggested a person actually spent their days here.
