“Are you sure about this, Avery?”

I ease into my cashmere coat and turn to face my mother.

“Yes, definitely.” I pull my hair free of the collar. “Mrs. Hattfield only lives fifteen minutes away. I’ll be back in time for dinner. Promise.”

“It’s not getting back I’m concerned about.” My own brown eyes stare back at me from my mother’s face, inlaid with concern.

“I know you lost Will, and he was your future. You loved him,” Mom says. “But Will was her son. It may not feel like it now, but you’ll find someone else. Marry. Have a family. You will move on. She only had one son. The pain of losing a child, you can’t imagine it.”

I finish tying the belt of my coat with slowed hands and a rapid heartbeat. Will wasn’t my future. I wasn’t in love with him, and it’s a different man I already can’t get out of my mind. The one who kissed my tears and rocked my world just days ago. I felt lighter after telling Deck the truth, and right now I want to tell someone else.

“Mom, there’s something I haven’t told you.” A self-deprecating laugh escapes me. “Hadn’t told anyone really until a few days ago.”

I get my nose for news from my mother. A journalism professor at Georgetown, it kind of broke her heart when I chose to attend Howard. She may have chosen the classroom, and I chose the field, but she still has the inquisitive mind of a journalist, and the questions gather in her eyes and between her brows as a frown.

“Okay.” She leans against the stairway bannister in our foyer. “What is it?”

Considering how closely I’ve guarded this secret, you’d think I’d reveal it with some ceremony. Not on my way out the door with the car already running and warming up.

“Will and I, well . . .” I drop my gaze to the hardwood floor and tug at the fingertips of my leather gloves. “We weren’t happy at the end.”

I glance up after a few moments of quiet. It’s not a stunned silence. It’s a knowing one. My mother doesn’t look surprised, merely curious, waiting for more.

“I suspected as much,” she finally says. “I could tell as soon as I met him that Will was a sad man, but you made him happy. As happy as one person can make another, but ultimately our happiness doesn’t hang on other people. We have to first be happy with ourselves, and I don’t know that Will ever was.”

Now I’m stunned. We haven’t talked much about Will’s suicide. Mom knows I found him in our apartment, but not much else.

“I was getting my things from the apartment because I’d broken off our engagement.” The soft admission reverberates through the foyer. “I had agreed to wait to tell everyone. He wanted that, for us to be sure, but I was sure.”

Rarely have I seen my mother truly off kilter, but I do now. Her mouth forms a little O of astonishment, before she covers it with her hand. She crosses the few feet from the stairs to reach me.

“Oh, baby.” She takes my face between her hands. “I had no idea. You’ve been blaming yourself, haven’t you?”

“Mama, he left a note.” I lean into the soft comfort of her hand. “For me. It was just to me, and I never told anyone. I kept it. I didn’t show the police or . . .”

A sob breaks free from my chest, and tears leak into her palm.

“What did I do?” I moan. “Did I . . . should I . . . I don’t . . .”

“Shhhh.” She pulls me close, the Chanel perfume she’s worn for decades a reassurance that breaks whatever tendrils of control I have. My tears pour out, an unrelenting, inconvenient storm. “It’s okay, baby. Let it out.”

She rocks me in an ancient maternal rhythm that no one teaches; the same one she used when I fell and scraped my knee. When I experienced my first heartbreak. When I buried Will a year ago. After a few moments, she pulls away, hands on my arms so she can look into my face. I sniff and pass my coat sleeve self-consciously under my runny nose.

“No, honey. That’s not how it works.” She gives a sad shake of her head. “Will was obviously a troubled man, and I know it feels like cause and effect. Like you broke it off and he ended his life. We experience life, all of us, in the bad and the good times and the good people and the ones who hurt us. Everyone does. There are some people life is just harder for than others. Will was one of those, but you told me before how he struggled and didn’t always take his medication.”

“I don’t want to make this about how he failed as a person. I don’t want to blame him,” I rush to say. “I’m not trying to ease my guilt.”

“Well I am.” My mother’s eyebrows elevate. “Because you have nothing to feel guilty about. Will hurt in a way that we will probably never understand, and for that there is no one to blame. But there’s a difference between blame and responsibility. We are each responsible for ourselves. And what Will did, he was responsible for.”

That’s a distinction I’ve tried to make to myself more than once, but I always seem to come back to my part in it, and anything I could have done differently. I nod, leaning forward to kiss her cheek before fastening the buttons left undone on my coat.

“I hear you, Mama.” I walk to the door and give her one last look over my shoulder. “I’ll be back.”

“Hey, you aren’t planning to tell Mrs. Hattfield that, are you?”

Was I? On some level, I feel like I need to get it off my chest; like I owe her an explanation.

“You told me,” my mother says, gripping my hand. “I’m glad you did, because I think you needed that, but that situation is already complicated enough for her. Knowing you and Will broke up only makes it more complicated. May just make it harder, and right now she feels you are the only one in the world close to understanding her pain.”

I think of our conversations over the last year. Not many, but each one, a release, a relief for us both.

“Don’t take that away from her with information that makes no difference,” Mama says. “That does no good. It might make you feel better, but it does nothing for her, and she’s your first concern now. That note was to you and you alone. Private. I just want her to be able to move on and accept your comfort. It wasn’t your fault. She’ll know that, but knowing this would only raise more questions, and she already has enough of those.”

I’m playing Mama’s words in my head when I pull up to Mrs. Hattfield’s. I park my father’s Tahoe in the driveway, noting the dying rose bush in front of the house. The grass is longer than the last time I was here, even though it’s winter. Her house, always neat and perfectly kept, appears slightly disheveled. I ring the doorbell, waiting. When there is no answer after a few moments, I walk over to the garage, peering in and finding the Cadillac Will used to tease his mother about.

“Are you a pimp, Ma?” he’d ask laughingly. “Rolling around in your Cadillac.”

I mouth the words, smiling at the image of Will seated in the living room just beyond the doors of this house. One year we helped Mrs. Hattfield trim her tree. Will roasted marshmallows in the fireplace. His mother and I had hot chocolate, and Will had cider. My life with him rushes back to me in vivid detail; the colors, the scents, the touches, the laughs, the tears, the good and the bad. All of it inundates my mind and blurs my vision.

And I miss him.

Not all the hurt we caused each other at the end. I miss the boy I met at a public library, who crushed on me for years without letting me know. Who took me trick or treating with his twelve-year-old cousin for our first date. I laughed with my friends about it, but we all thought it was sweet.

“God, Will.” I shake my head, blinking at the tears freezing before they fall. I turn to leave, my steps dragging toward Dad’s SUV.

“Avery?”

I turn at the sound of my name, and Mrs. Hattfield stands at the front door, her chin wobbling and her face already streaked with tears. I run, avoiding little patches of ice, needing to get to her. As soon as I’m close, her arms stretch out and she pulls me into her. Her sobs vibrate into my chest.

“I miss him.” Mrs. Hattfield weeps unashamedly, her head buried in the collar of my coat. “God, I miss him so much.”

“I know,” I whisper, my pain communing with hers. “So do I.”

And it doesn’t matter if I was wearing his ring. If we were lovers or friends at the end. If he cheated or how we injured each other. All that matters is that I loved him, and so did she. That besides the woman I’m holding, I was closer to him than anyone else on the planet. She and I knew his strengths and his weaknesses like no one else ever did, and can console one another uniquely.

We stand like that for I’m not sure how long. Long enough for the winter cold to bite through my gloves and whip beneath my coat. I pull back and look through the open front door. It’s dark in there. No sign of life. No savory smells of food cooking or the pine scent of a live Christmas tree.

“Get your coat, Mrs. H,” I command gently. “You’re coming home with me.”

I didn’t get to tell my mom I was bringing someone home for Christmas dinner, but when I arrive, Mrs. Hattfield in tow, she doesn’t look surprised and already has an extra plate at the table.

“How’d you know?” I ask her quietly while we set out side dishes.

“I know you.” She smiles, pride in her eyes that has nothing to do with anything I’ve achieved or a goal I’ve crushed. She’s proud of me for who I am, not for what I’ve done. Mrs. Hattfield and I share a tearful smile at dinner before we say grace. Still sorting through the tangle of guilt and shame and pain and fury, I hope one day soon I’ll know me, too.