My daughter called me almost every night that summer, yet somehow hid the one thing that mattered. When I came to bring her home, I realized the secrecy had started months earlier.
The Saturday I drove to pick up Sophie, I caught myself humming to the radio.
Three hours of highway, cold coffee, and her favorite cinnamon rolls beside me. I’d missed her.
There was one girl from housekeeping.
For five years, since my husband Daniel died, it had just been the two of us in that quiet house.
We had a rhythm: dinners, Sunday movies, and a call every evening she was away at college.
So when she took the summer job at the lakeside resort, three hours from home, I told myself it was healthy.
“You’ll call me, right?” I had asked her that first morning, holding her too tight in the driveway.
“What’s her name?”
“Every night, Mom. I promise.”
