Page 49 of The Someday Daughter

Camilla’s standing immediately in front of the violent red Emergency sign, which is exactly what this feels like.

“No,” I say, stopping in my tracks.

“Audrey.” She moves toward me, and when she pulls off her enormous sunglasses there are dark circles under her eyes. She’s wearing her same master-of-disguise baseball cap and her blonde hair in a ponytail. Jeans and a hoodie. The whole getup makes her look twenty years old, like someone young enough to have no idea what they’re doing. But she’s known. All this time, she’s known.

“Is it true?” I say, and then she stops, too. There are ten feet of hot air between us, humid and stagnant. Sweat breaks on the back of my neck.

She doesn’t beat around the bush, though it’s what I expect her to do. She doesn’t say, Is what true?, though there’s more than one lie between us. She just says, “Yes. It’s true.”

“Wow,” I say, the word punching out of me like a bullet. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard myself hit this volume. “You’re unbelievable.”

I sidestep her, making for Fruit Street and the T station.

“Audrey—” She reaches for my elbow and I yank it out of her hand.

“Don’t touch me.”

Distantly, I’m aware of people watching us: a father and his child headed into the building, someone in a uniform glancing up from their phone. My mother shoves her sunglasses back on.

“Can we please talk about this?” she says, following me.

“No,” I shout without turning around. “You’ve had eighteen years to talk to me about this.”

“Honey, that’s not fair—”

“It’s not fair?” I whirl around, bag jerking off my shoulder into the crook of my elbow. “No, Mom. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that you kept this from me. It’s not fair that you used me to boost your career without actually getting to know me.” I suck in a breath. “It’s not fair that I’m always trying to live up to some fictional version of me you’ve told the whole world about.”

“Audrey,” she says. I wish she’d stop saying my name, reinserting me into this conversation that I don’t want to be part of. “I didn’t—”

“Yes, you did.” When I start walking again, she does, too. “You made me out to be someone in all your lectures and on all your social media, so I became that person, or she became me—I can’t even separate it out.” I’m waving a hand through the air in front of me as I walk. I’m not even thinking the words, they’re just coming out—for once, I’m just letting them all come out. “And none of it was even true. And it feels like if I don’t keep up with this story you’ve told about me, I’ll just stop existing or something.” I look at her, and it makes tears burn behind my eyes. “Sometimes I can’t even tell if I chose my personality. Sometimes I don’t even know who I am.” We stop at a crosswalk and a car screams past, sending a gust of hot air across us both. “It’s like you just made me up.”

She looks stricken. Camilla St. Vrain, who has an answer for everything. But if anyone should get to be speechless here, it’s me. I’m sick of waiting for the crossing light, and I’m sick of waiting for her. I turn on my heel and start up Charles Street.

“Audrey, wait.” I hear her jog after me, pristine white sneakers cutting up the sidewalk. “Honey, I had no idea you felt that way. I wish—”

“You didn’t ask,” I say, looking straight ahead. We could be in a speed walking competition, we’re moving so fast. “Maybe you were too busy thinking about your actual someday daughter to check in with your spare.”

“Okay, enough.” She takes my hand, and before I can pull it away, she locks our fingers together. I squirm my palm against hers and she squeezes even tighter. It’s torture.

“Let go,” I say, loudly enough that the person walking past us stops to stare. Then they keep staring, and when they pull a phone from their bag, I know they know who we are.

“Shit,” my mother says, and starts tugging me toward the pedestrian overpass. We hustle up the stairs and over the sound tunnel of Charles Street, cars sprinting beneath us. When I glance back, the person is gone.

“It’s fine,” I say. When she keeps pulling my arm without slowing down, I say it again. “Mom, it’s fine, they’re gone. Let go of me.”

But she doesn’t. “If I let go, you’ll run away, and we need to talk about this.”

“Where?” I have to shout so she’ll hear me over the traffic. “Suspended up here on top of the highway?”

“That park.” She points down the stairs on the other side of the overpass, where a green strip separates Charles Street from the river. “Come on.”

I strain against her hand again, and when I finally break free, she turns around to scrabble after me.

“I’m not running away!” I say, and for a moment we pause to stare at each other. We’re both panting. “I just don’t want to be led around like a kindergartner.”

“Fine.” She sucks in a breath and turns around, leading me the rest of the way over the street and into the park. When she motions me onto a bench, I sit at one far end and indicate that she should do the same. She does, turning her entire body toward me. She takes off her sunglasses.

“Audrey, I’m sorry.” She lets it hang there between us, and I scoff out a laugh.

“For which part, Mom?”

“All of it.” She folds her hands together and squeezes them. “I was wrong not to tell you about my first pregnancy, but it was another life. It was—”

“It’s not another life,” I say. “It’s your life. The same one. And Sadie’s here, right now.”

“But I didn’t know.” Her voice scrapes, and she clears her throat. “I had no idea who Sadie was until last night, same as you.”

“Because you pushed her away,” I say. “When she reached out, all those years ago—”

“Magnolia,” she says simply. It takes her a few minutes to keep going, like she’s tamping everything down to make space for her words to come out. “Magnolia didn’t tell me that Sadie reached out when she turned eighteen. I knew her birthday was coming up, of course, and that she’d have access to that information, if she wanted it.” She draws a shaky breath. “But Magnolia handles all the mail, and she hid it from me, and so I assumed Sadie didn’t want to know who her biological mother was. Or that if she did know, she didn’t want to contact me. And that was absolutely her choice to make. So I let it go. I moved on, to focus on my daughter.” Her eyes are steady on mine. “You.”

I shake my head. “Why would Mags hide it?”

“A misguided attempt to protect my career,” she says wearily. “She’s as shocked as I am, believe me. She didn’t know who Sadie was until last night, either.” She looks up at me. “All those years ago, when Sadie reached out to her anonymously, all Mags knew for sure was that I’d spoken of you as the someday daughter. She thought that if the world found out I’d given birth to another child—”

“You’d look like a liar,” I finish for her. “But it wasn’t misguided; it was true. You did lie.”

“Audrey—” she starts, but I cut her off.

“Who’s the book about, Mom? Who’s the someday daughter?”

We stare at each other. Warm air moves off the water, over the grass. My mother draws a breath.

“I wrote the book to process my own decision not to become a mother, that first time.” She glances at the river, presses her lips together. “I was twenty when I gave birth to Sadie. My parents were gone, I had no family, I hardly knew her father. When I held her in the hospital, I knew I wasn’t ready to be a mother. I knew giving her to her true parents was the right thing to do. I didn’t question it then, while she was with me. It felt so clear.” She runs her thumb over the back of her hand, pressing hard. “I only questioned it later, and then I questioned it for years. I wrote the book to help me untangle the choice I’d made, and to forgive myself for not doing what the world told me I was created to do: desire motherhood, choose it above all else.” She turns back to me, holds my gaze. “And I wrote it as a kind of love letter, something to put into the world for the daughter I knew I’d never mother.”

My breath is a desperate tangle in my chest. When I speak, my voice wavers. “So it was about her. I’ve never been part of this at all.”

“Honey, you’re part of everything.” My mother leans toward me, sliding a little closer on the bench. “And when you were born, at a completely different stage of my life, people assumed that of course the book was written in anticipation of you, and—”

“And you let them believe it,” I say. “You lied.”

She doesn’t defend herself. She doesn’t seem to know what to say at all.

I swallow, trying to clear the tightness in my throat. “If you didn’t keep her, why did you keep me?”

In the space before my mother responds the words bubble up in me, a pleading whisper: Because I loved you, because I wanted you. I want to hear them with searing, immediate shame.

“Because everything was different this time,” she says finally. “Because it was a decision your father and I needed to make together.”

But what I hear is: Because he made me keep you.

I make to stand, and she says, “Honey, wait. Please. Please.”

When I look back at her she’s blurry, and I wipe my tears roughly away. She doesn’t deserve them. I want so badly to be alone.

“Audrey, you’re so smart.” I sigh harshly, and she holds up a hand. “No, I mean it. You’ve always been so much smarter than me.”

When I lower myself back onto the bench, she keeps going.

“You came out of the womb like that. Analytical. Precise and curious.” She draws a rickety breath. “But it was easy to be your mom when you were small: scraped knee, Band-Aid. Midafternoon tantrum, nap. You needed me so tangibly.” I look away from her, watch a party line of ants track across the walking path. “Sometimes I don’t know how to be a mother to you, because I know you don’t need me anymore. You’re brilliant. I sent you to school so you could get what you needed.” She swallows, looks down at her hands and then back up at me. “We expect our children to need the same things we do, but they don’t. And I wanted you to have everything I didn’t know how to give you.”

I look at her. “What do you need that I don’t need?”

She smiles, lets out a short exhale. “Permission. Other people’s approval. I’ve always needed those things. I spent years hearing other people’s voices in my head before I heard my own.” She spreads her hands in the space between us. “That’s part of the reason I wrote the book. I had horrible guilt over a choice that I knew was the right one for me. I didn’t offer myself any kindness, or trust my own intuition. And you’ve never struggled with that. You’ve always honored what you want. It’s one of my favorite things about you.” She starts to tear up, and I have to look away. “You’re incredible, Audrey. And so brave—not like me. I knew I had a daughter out there, somewhere, but I could only acknowledge it in this veiled way.” She lets out a strangled exhale and I look back up at her. “I built a career on a book I wrote for her and I couldn’t admit it—even though I wrote the whole book to tell myself that what I’d done was okay. I wasn’t brave.”

It feels simultaneously satisfying and devastating to hear her admit it.

“And when people came along and assumed the book was about you, I wasn’t brave enough to correct them, either. Because you were right in front of me, and you were my whole life, and—” She breaks off, swallows. “I loved you so much. Love you so much. And it hurts me to hear that you feel I’ve shaped you into something you’re not.” She braces a hand on the bench between us, almost reaching for me but not. “Because that was the opposite of what I wanted. I chose the Summit School so you could have a normal life, out of the spotlight, and discover yourself away from any association with me.” She clears her throat. “But it sounds like I was misguided on that front, too.”

I look up at her, and for a moment we’re quiet. I wonder if we’ve ever understood where the other’s coming from on the first try. If we’ve ever tried at all.

“I liked school,” I say finally. “I just wanted to have a mom, too.”

She nods, and a tear rolls down her cheek. She brushes it away with the tips of her fingers. “I’m sorry. I know we haven’t—” She hesitates, swallows. “I know I haven’t been as present for you as I should be. We could have done this tour in a whirlwind two weeks, but I drew it out because I wanted to spend the summer with you.” She draws a breath. “When I lost my parents, I’d been away at school for two years, wrapped up in my life, and suddenly they were just gone. I wanted to fix this before I lost you like that.”

Something whispers, angry, from deep inside me. But did you ever want me at all?

“Audrey,” she says, when I still haven’t spoken. “I’m so sorry I kept this from you. I’m so sorry about all of it. I didn’t handle it well.”

“But how did you handle it so badly?” I’ve been holding my bag on my lap this whole time, and my thighs are going numb. “You’re a therapist.”

She breathes something that almost sounds like a laugh. “Being a therapist means I know better. It doesn’t mean I always do better. That’s why therapy isn’t a one-and-done thing: you don’t go to a session and learn the lessons and leave a cured person. It’s ongoing work. It’s lifelong.” She looks at me. “You have to keep choosing the right thing—and it’s usually the hard thing. I don’t always make the right choice.”

My eyes glaze with tears, and I blink them away. “Was it the right choice? Keeping me?”

“Oh, honey.” She reaches for me finally, and I let it happen. My bag is a hard obstacle between us, and when she hooks her chin over my shoulder it presses into my stomach. “Of course. Of course. When I wrote the book I was imagining this daughter I knew I’d never raise. It was intangible—it was hypothetical.” She pulls away, ducks her chin to make me look at her. “Having a child in real life isn’t the same. It’s so much more complicated and so much better.”

I draw a shaky breath, pull back to look at her. “But there’s two of us,” I say. “In real life.”

Her eyes scan mine, brilliant blue and blurry with tears. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “And I think it’s time we go talk to her.”