There was rain—gentle at first, then relentless, drumming like fingertips across the windshield. I remember my mom laughing beside me. My fingers tapped the wheel as I rambled about Nate, the guy in my chem class with a crooked smile and too much cologne.

She glanced over, smirking.

“He sounds like trouble, Maeve.”

Then came the headlights.

Too fast. Too close.

Then came the screaming.

I was no longer in the car. I didn’t know how I got out. My knees were soaked in mud, my hands covered in blood that wasn’t mine.

Mom was sprawled across the pavement, twisted wrong, her eyes wide and staring at nothing. I screamed her name over and over, my voice raw and tearing until the sirens drowned me out.

I heard someone mention a drunk driver.

Then another voice said, “The mother was driving.”

I wanted to say they were wrong. That it wasn’t her. That it was me. But my voice wouldn’t work. My mind couldn’t hold onto the words.

Then everything went black.

When I woke, I was in a hospital bed, blinking against too-bright lights. Machines beeped. A nurse hovered. My body ached, dull and heavy, and in the blur of it all, the door creaked open.

For half a second, I thought it was Mom.

But it was Thomas. My father.

He looked older. More tired than I remembered. He sat beside me and laid a hand over mine, awkward and unfamiliar.

“Hey, kid,” he said.

And just like that, I knew she wasn’t coming.

Two weeks later, I woke up in a different bed. In a house that didn’t feel like mine.

Julia was humming in the kitchen. She moved like someone trying too hard to feel normal.

She placed a bowl in front of me—oatmeal topped with flaxseeds, blueberries, and a hopeful smile. “I added hemp hearts,” she offered, like that might magically make the grief go away.

I stared at the spoon. My stomach growled, but I couldn’t eat it. I wanted cheap waffles. I wanted pancakes at midnight with my mom at Sam’s Diner, watching the guy who always fell asleep in booth six.

I pushed the bowl away. Julia said nothing, just slid a protein ball across the table like an offering. I didn’t touch that either.