Chapter Eleven

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Chapter Eleven

When I woke up the next morning, I had missed texts from Katy. While I was asleep, she'd thanked me for driving her to and from the cabin last night, and asked me if I wanted to come by her place for lunch. I texted back telling her I'd be there in an hour, and then I climbed out of bed and made my way downstairs.

There were few things that my mother couldn't do, but cooking was definitely one of them. Even before Paige had left, the only things my mother ever put on the stove was water in a pot, and even that sometimes boiled away. But when I walked down the hall to pour myself some coffee, she was standing in front of the stove, frying eggs and bacon in a pan.

I lingered in the hallway for just a quick second, watching her back as she turned towards the cupboards, pulling salt and pepper off of the shelf. When I listened close enough, it almost sounded like she was humming.

"Mom?" I said, almost disbelieving.

She turned towards me, and her demeanor seemed to shift. There was a smile on her face, but her shoulders had stiffened and her eyes had gone hard. She swallowed, looking guilty, as though I caught her doing something she shouldn't have been doing. "Wren. Good morning."

"Morning," I nodded, moving into the kitchen. There was still coffee in the pot, just enough that I didn't need to make any more. I reached into the cupboard and grabbed a mug, keeping my eyes on my mom as she turned back towards the stove and scraped the bottom of the pan full of eggs with a flipper. I blinked.

I poured the rest of the coffee into the mug and topped it off with cream and sugar, doing my best to ignore the silence that hung between the two of us. After months of it, I would have thought I'd be used to neither of us knowing what to say to each other, but I wasn't. I felt like I didn't know her, as if I hadn't known her all my life. She was more of a stranger than she was my mother.

With the coffee mug in hand, I stepped past her towards the front door. I could feel her eyes on me as I pulled open the shoe closet door, and I hesitated. The black and white vans were right there, but my mom was watching me like a bird and prey, as though she knew exactly what I was thinking. I swallowed and slipped my old runners onto my feet, and I left.

There were only four cars sitting in the parking lot outside Gabriel's Groceries. I pulled in two empty spots away from it and climbed out of my car, texting Katy to let her know I was outside. When I stepped into the store, she was talking to her brother, who stood behind the register with a nametag pinned to the left side of his shirt. The two of them looked up as I walked over, each sporting smiles.

"Hey," Katy said. "I hope you like margherita pizza, because that's what I put in the oven."

I shrugged, "Works for me."

"Great," she said, reaching over and grabbing my elbow. She led me away from Miles and the register towards the door at the end of the room. Katy pushed it open and I followed her up a narrow set of stairs to another door at the top. Sitting just on the other side of that, her mom was curled up under a blanket watching TV in their living room7

When Katy and I came inside, she smiled and stood, the blanket falling off her legs and onto the ground. She looked at it but did nothing, and instead reached across the coffee table to shake my hand. "You must be Wren. I'm Cassandra, it's nice to meet you."

"You, too." I said, smiling back. Cassandra sat back down on the couch and reached over to grab the blanket, spreading it back out over herself.

Katy led the way into the kitchen, where a timer on the oven read just over four minutes, and was counting down. She pressed a button on the top and the light came on, and she leaned over to peer inside. "I'm starving. I wish this would cook faster."

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