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Eden

R hys leaves the next morning for his couple of days in New York, and I throw myself into work at the shop so I don’t have to think about what happened yesterday in Matias’s office.

Rhys’s sharp, hard no .

After the meeting with Matias, we grabbed dinner with Hanna, then went back to Rhys’s place and watched a few more Outlander episodes. We made out on the couch until things escalated and our clothes flew off and I came on Rhys’s fingers.

Then I wanted to go down on him, and he reminded me that he was getting up at the crack of dawn for work. And I didn’t push. Because…

Because it wouldn’t have changed the essentials of the situation. The fact that he’s already moving away from me, back toward his real life.

I’m standing at the front counter, cutting and folding fat quarters—eighteen-by-twenty-two-inch rectangles of fabric—when the door chimes and Paul steps in.

My stomach lurches and drops. As much as I told Mari that seeing him was a nonevent for me, the truth is more complicated. Even if my dreams about him were misguided, seeing him still reminds me that those dreams are over. It’s a pin in a balloon.

A reminder of how easy it is for people to walk away from each other.

“Hi,” he says quietly. He’s holding a slim cardboard box in his hands.

“Hi.”

“Uh, sorry to show up again. I know you probably want to be done with me?—”

“You said it, I didn’t,” I say, and it manages to come out sounding not too angry and bitter, which pleases me. I don’t want him to feel like I care, because, fundamentally, I don’t.

“I sent all the gifts back, but—” He holds out the cardboard sleeve. “I was ninety-eight percent sure this one couldn’t be returned, and I figured you’d maybe want to see it and decide what you wanted to do with it.”

I take it from him; it’s one of those sleeves they send books in, and this one is heavy, like it holds a coffee table book. “Thanks.”

“I’m gonna…” He indicates the door.

“Yup.” Politeness urges me to say something else, maybe See you around or Have a great life , but I can’t actually force either one out, so I raise a hand in a half-hearted wave, and then he’s gone.

The cardboard sleeve has been opened. I fold back the flap.

It’s a printed glossy book, the high-quality kind you can order from a premium photo storage site.

Caryn and Eden , the book is titled.

My mom and me.

My stomach goes cold and heavy—way worse than when Paul walked in. It doesn’t matter how much you tell yourself you don’t care when someone walks out on you. If someone who should love you abandons you, it leaves a mark, one that doesn’t get completely erased by time.

After a lot of therapy, soul searching, and conversations with Paul, I invited my mom to the wedding.

I don’t have much of a relationship with her, but not inviting her felt like it had more emotional weight than just including her.

I was pretty sure she wouldn’t come anyway and that if she did, she would at least not make things about her. She’s good that way—if in no other.

She couldn’t come. She was on tour. Her assistant, Luann, RSVP’d for her. Caryn asked me to let you know that she so, so, so wishes she could be there, but she has a concert that night in Rome. She sends so much love—gift to follow.

And here it is, that gift.

I open the book and turn the pages slowly.

It’s photo after photo of me and my mom.

There were lots of them when I was very little, until she left when I was four.

Then there’s a gap—nothing. She stayed away completely for more than four years, and the next time I saw her was when she visited me at my grandmother’s.

There are photos from that visit—me unwrapping the expensive gifts she’s brought, me licking the ice-cream cone she indulged me with, me at the expensive kids’ theater production she took me to.

At nine, I look happy with an edge of mania, like I’ve psyched myself up for the moment—and like I know it could be snatched away at any time.

Or maybe I’m just projecting back onto myself what I know now.

After the ice-cream-and-theater extravaganza, there was an average of one visit per year, the photos following the same pattern: age-appropriate indulgences and a few hours spent in her company—before she swept off again, back to her glamorous life.

In middle and high school, some of the photos are of me at her concerts or with her afterward, and I can still remember the mingled smells of her makeup and her sweat when she draped an arm briefly around me before she was called away—to sign an album or meet with a producer or because a rich-and-famous man invited her to have dinner with him.

By age fifteen or so I’d learned the pattern well enough not to let myself have feelings about her arrival or her departure: Seeing her was a thing I did to oblige her and my grandmother or because it benefitted me—the gifts were great, and I could take selfies with a famous pop star to impress my friends.

My mother was warm and effusive where my grandmother was not, and that sometimes made it hard to steel myself against her, but I did anyway.

It’s just as hard to steel myself against this book. Against the thought that even though she couldn’t come to the wedding, she bothered to pull this together for me. She sat with these photos and these memories, and they couldn’t have meant nothing to her, could they have?

I don’t want the tears to well up in my eyes; I don’t want to want to call her to say thank you; I don’t want to hope that maybe as adults we’ll have a relationship.

I’m gripping the book too tightly, my hands shaking. The cardboard sleeve tumbles off my lap onto the floor, disgorging a sheet of paper—the packing slip, with its gift message:

Your mom asked me to put this together for you. We both wish you all the happiness in the world. Love, Luann.