“Oh, sorry.” He sounds distracted.

Best guess? He’s on his way in to work.

“Sorry I haven’t had time to call,” he says. “The project deadline is coming up and it’s making everyone at the office extremely tense.”

“I understand, I—”

“Large coffee, two Splendas and a splash of half-and-half,” Dad says. Obviously not to me. “Sorry, sweetheart, what were you saying?”

“Just that I know you’re busy.”

That hasn’t changed. Dad is always busy. Why would I think that, just because I’m halfway across the country from my entire life, that his has changed in any way? Even Mom is job hunting, so she’ll probably end up just as busy and not around. As always.

“Tell me about school,” he says, then, “Thank you,” to the barista. “How’s Texas?”

“Gross,” I say. “Hot. Humid. Boring.”

He laughs. “Sounds like the Texas I know. What about the school?”

I flop back onto my pillows. “School is school,” I say. “It goes.”

There is a long silence. I can picture Dad navigating his way from the little coffee shop in the ground floor of his high-rise office, through the security checkpoint, to the elevators. If I don’t make my plea soon, I’ll lose him to the signal.

“I want to come home,” I say plainly.

“I know you do, sweetheart. I miss you, too.”

The sounds of footsteps on marble echo through the phone, and I know he’s crossing the lobby. Even on a Saturday morning, the building bustles with the energy of a never-sleeping multi-national corporation.

I resort to begging. “Dad, please. You can talk to Mom,” I plead. “You can convince her to—”

“It isn’t only your mother’s decision.” The phone gets silent, and at first I think he’s stepped onto the elevator and I’ve lost him. But then he says, “What you did was reckless and dangerous. Better that you spend your senior year somewhere you hate than in jail or worse.”

“Come on, you’re being a bit overly dramatic.”

“The rules aren’t changing,” he says. “No trespassing. No guerrilla art. No staying out past curfew. No—”

“Tash. No disobeying a direct order. No skipping class or not turning in homework or getting called to the office. I know.” They’re burned into my brain. If it weren’t against one of The Rules, I would get them tattooed on my forearm.

Okay, so I’m not explicitly forbidden from getting any skin art, but it’s definitely implied.

“Mitchell, wait up.” Dad’s voice is muffled, like he’s holding the phone to his chest. “We need to run the new numbers for accounting.”

Mitchell’s reply is equally muffled. “I was just on my way up to do that.”

“I have to go,” Dad says. “We’ll talk again soon.”

“Okay Dad. Bye, I love—” The phone goes dead before I can finish.

It doesn’t matter anyway. Dad never says it back.

“Love you, too,” I say to the ceiling.

I know that he does. He has to, right? He’s biologically obligated.

But sometimes—okay, most of the time—it feels like he loves his work more. Is it any wonder I’m such a mess when it comes to love and relationships? See: Daddy, issues with.

Morning sunlight streams in through my window. All I really want to do is pull the covers over my head and sleep until noon.

I yank up the comforter. But instead of closing my eyes, I find myself staring at the way the light glows through the fabric and feathers. A chaotic pattern of translucence and shadow. I can’t stop staring.

“Why am I not asleep?”

When no answer—and no drowsiness—comes from the void, I flip the comforter back and roll out of bed. If I’m going to be up this early, I should at least have a cup of caffeine to show for it.

I shuffle downstairs, into the kitchen, and stop dead in my tracks when I see Mom standing at the stove. Cooking breakfast.

And not just a toaster waffle breakfast.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” she says with an uncharacteristic smile in place.

“What are you making?” I ask, completely in shock.

“Pancakes.” She casually flips one over, revealing a perfect golden finish. “Apple cinnamon.”

I can’t speak, can only blink for several seconds as she flips three more perfectly cooked pancakes. The closest thing Mom ever came to non-frozen breakfast was bringing home doughnuts, croissants, and the occasional cronut.

“Do you want juice?” she asks.

I jerk myself out of my shock. “Coffee.”

She gives me a look, and I can feel the lecture coming.

I hold up a hand to stop her. “I am awake and up before noon on a weekend,” I argue. “I deserve coffee.”

To my continued shock, she smiles and says, “Fair enough.”

What’s going on here? It’s almost like old Mom is back—and better than before. I am immediately skeptical.

While she flips pancakes onto plates, I make myself a cup of coffee from the single-cup machine I had to convince her to buy in the first place. As the caffeine juice brews, I inhale a deep scent of hazelnut-flavored perfection.

“Come on,” Mom says, carrying a tray containing the pancakes, two glasses of orange juice, and a bottle of maple syrup to the kitchen table. “We can have our first real breakfast in our new house.”

It’s on the tip of my tongue to say something snarky about the house, or at least its location and/or temporary nature, but the lure of maple syrup on pancakes wins. I slide into the seat across from her and take a sip from my steaming cup of coffee.

“Maybe we can make this a regular ritual,” she says, placing one of the plates in front of me. “Mother-daughter time on Saturday morning.”

I half snort. “Until you get your job.”

As soon as she does, it’ll be back to normal. No baking, no breakfasts, and certainly no mother-daughter time on a morning when she could be at the office. Which is pretty much every morning.

I stuff a big forkful of pancake into my mouth. It is maybe the best thing I’ve ever tasted. Seriously, I feel deprived that for the first seventeen years of my life, Mom never cooked. That’s a tragedy.

“That’s not true,” she says, placing her napkin in her lap. “In fact, I’ve already found a job, and here I am.”

We’ve only been here a few days, and already she’s found work? Maybe part-time, temporary attorneys are in high demand.

I finish chewing my pancake and wash it down with a swig of juice.

“What’s the job?”

“Legal advisor to the Museum of Classical Art Austin.”

“Wow, that’s…”

“Cool, right?”

“I was going to say big.”

And by big I mean real. That’s a real job. Not just something temporary to fill her time while we’re stuck in Texas. Not some part-time, filling-in gig.

Not the kind of job you find in less than a week of job hunting.

The hair on the back of my neck tingles.

“You didn’t just start looking for a job, did you?”

She looks down at her plate. “I started putting out feelers just before summer started,” she says. “Right after…”

The Incident.

My blood starts pounding in my ears, and I have the sudden urge to sweep my arm across the table, sending every dish and tasty morsel flying.

Great. Good to know that, even though she and Dad sprang the whole surprise-you’re-moving-to-Texas thing on me totally last minute—as in barely a week before we left, hence the disastrously packed boxes—it wasn’t really quite the spontaneous decision they made it out to be at the time.

It also means that they kept it a secret from me all summer. What did they think I would do? Run away?

Maybe I would have. Maybe I should have.

“Nice.”

I push back from the table, leaving my pancakes mostly untouched. I wouldn’t want to heave apple-cinnamon chunks on our mother-daughter ritual. Coffee in hand, I head for the stairs.

“Sloane, wait,” Mom calls after me.

I don’t stop to hear what she has to say. She can’t possibly have anything to say that I want to hear. When I get to my room, I make sure to slam the door as hard as possible. Hopefully she gets the message.