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Her dad, still focused on butchering a hunk of ginger, let out a hum. “Floundering is just another word for figuring it out.”

Kiera shot him a flat look. “That’s not even remotely true.”

Her mom slid a cup of tea in front of her. “You’re going to be fine, sweetheart. The right teaching job will come once this part is behind you.”

Kiera couldn’t help but groan. “Trust the process, right? Well, in case you have your rose-colored parent glasses still on, I am extremely bad at that. I’m divorced, I live with my parents, and I need help raising my daughters.”

Her parents exchanged a glance, the kind of silent parental communication that usually meant they were about to approach a subjectcarefully.

Her dad cleared his throat. “You’re worried about the girls.”

Kiera pressed her fingers into her temples. “Of course I’m worried about the girls. I’m worried I won’t get a job in the fall, and that I moved them here without any kind of plan beyond ‘start over and hope for the best’.”

Her mom frowned. “You’ve always landed on your feet. This won’t be any different.”

“That’s the thing,” Kiera said, voice tight. “I don’t feel like I’m landing anywhere. I feel like I’m just free-falling, hoping the application is going to magically fix everything.”

Her dad finally abandoned the ginger and leaned against the counter, arms crossed. “Or maybe you’re just adjusting. Starting over is hard — doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.”

Kiera scoffed, shaking her head. “You don’t get it. I used toknowwho I was. I was good at my job. I thought I was a good wife. A good mom. I had a system. Now I’m pretending I’m not terrified that I’ve made a huge mistake.”

Now that the words were out there, they felt disingenuous. She knew she’d done the right thing by leaving, by bringing thegirls to Denver, by ensuring that they’d see their mom being strong and standing up for herself.

A silence settled over the kitchen, warm but weighty. Kiera stared into her tea, her pulse a little too quick, her nerves too raw.

Her mom was the first to speak again, voice softer. “Sweetheart… is this really about applications or a spreadsheet?”

Kiera swallowed. “What?”

Her dad gave her a knowing look. “You’ve been organizing that same column for damn near an hour. So… what else is going on?”

Kiera opened her mouth, then closed it. The words were there, but they caught in her throat. The intensity of the last few days — Izzy’s kiss, the way it felt like something inside her had been knocked loose — sat like a stone in her chest.

She took a breath. “I kissed a woman.” She pointedly didnotadd that they’d had epically good phone sex the night before.

There was a beat of silence before her mom let out a dramatic sigh of relief. “Finally.”

Her dad, however, simply broke into a slow, satisfied grin. He turned to her mom with an outstretched hand, palm open. “Pay up,” he said with a grin like he’d just won the lottery.

Kiera blinked. “Wait.You bet on me kissing a woman?On… coming out, I suppose?”

“Notifyou’d come out —when,” her dad corrected with a grin. “Your mom said last year. I said you’d figure it out before forty. Clearly, I had faith.”

Kiera let out a strangled noise, somewhere between disbelief and sheer mortification. “Are you serious? You knew… what?”

Her dad shrugged, unbothered. “Kid, we knew you were queer long before you did.”

Kiera stared at them, her heart still racing. “Okay, so you’re bothshockinglycalm about this. But I’m still kind of…” She waved a hand, struggling for the right words. “Processing.”

She hadn’t expected it to feel like this — like her ribs had loosened a notch, like she could finally exhale after holding her breath for years without realizing it. And still, part of her couldn’t help scanning their faces for any flicker of hesitation, any shift in tone that might mean she’d read it wrong. But there was nothing. Just quiet warmth and the easy rhythm of her parents acting like they were talking about the weather.

It should’ve felt anticlimactic. Instead, it felt huge. Not loud or dramatic — just quietly, terrifyingly real.

She hadn’t even said the words out loud until recently. And now, here she was, standing in her childhood kitchen, saying them without apology and being met with love.

Her throat tightened. Processing didn’t even begin to cover it.

Her mom reached over and squeezed her hand. “And that’s okay, sweetheart. But just so you know — you don’t have to have it all figured out right this second. And you don’t have to be scared to tell us things like this.”