I sat in the driveway for eleven minutes before I could make my hands stop shaking long enough to turn off the engine.
My mom's voice was still in my ears – how COULD you and I'm finally happy and fix it – playing on a loop that got louder every time I tried to think past it. I'd driven here because I needed her to see me. Not hear me through a phone, not process this through the filter of Richard's version of events. I needed to sit in front of my mother and explain that I'd known Rhys before the dinner, before the stepbrother reveal, before any of it. That this wasn't some reckless girl throwing a grenade into her mother's happiness for a fling. That it was real and complicated and I was drowning in it and I needed my mom to be my mom right now, not Richard's fiancée.
The front door op
