What took you so long?” my mom asks when she answers the door. I can’t actually see her yet— she’s just speaking through the closed door, her voice barely audible over the clicks and slides of the half dozen locks she has to go through any time she needs to open it up.

“Minor car accident. I’m fine,” I say, and the locks start to move faster. She finally swings the door open, her face a knot of worry, appraising me. She reaches forward, brushes my hair from my face, grabs each of my hands, squeezes my fingers—

“Mom,” I say as calmly as I can. “I’m fine. Really.” I have to stay calm with her— if I get irritated or try to shake her off, I know she’ll just use those emotions to feed her anxiety.

“If you see dark sides on your vision let me know. That can mean a concussion. How did it happen?” she asks fearfully.

I want to vent about the whole experience— about douchebag Heath, about the way he clearly thinks he’s above this town, that road, me. About how he acted like it was my fault and even invented a dog just to make me feel bad. But I know how my mother is. If she hears there was a man involved, she’ll worry, she’ll suspect I was nearly a victim of a carjacking or kidnapping or sex trafficking ring or God only knows what else. If I were to tell him that Heath was twice my size and had shoulder muscles like carved marble? She’d really lose her mind.

“Come on, let’s go sit,” I say, pushing toward her, ignoring her question. “I can’t stay long. I’ve got to get some work done today and I didn’t bring my laptop.”

“Okay— can you check the back first though? That’s where I heard it.”

“Of course,” I answer. I leave her in the dark kitchen— this place is always dark, since she leaves the blinds shut— and head to the screened in porch out back. It’s a nice porch. Hell, it’s a nice house, really. She keeps it tidy, keeps the outside painted, has lawn people come to plant pansies in the fall and mow grass in the summer. She just never leaves, is the thing. She stays holed up inside behind her half dozen locks, opening them only for me and occasionally a delivery person.

I understand why, but that doesn’t make it any less difficult to witness.

I make a show of looking under the porch, into the crawl space, and behind the air conditioning unit, since I know she’s watching me. I appraise the yard, the big oak trees, the fence line, the shed by her overgrown garden. I peer through the enormous privacy fence, check under the porch again, then finally come back inside.

“Nothing’s out there,” I say. “There’s no one.”

“Oh, good. Maybe it was a raccoon. Or maybe he left when he saw you coming over,” she says.

“Probably the raccoon,” I say. “Did you call your therapist before calling me, like we talked about?”

My mom looks down, busying herself with the way the books on the nearest end table are arranged— she wants the house to look perfect, always, even though no one is going to see it these days. There’s a photograph on top of the table; of my sixth birthday party, which is the one and only picture that even suggests I have a father. He’s not in the shot, but his sister, my Aunt Lisa, is, along with my newborn cousin. We don’t talk to them anymore, of course— when it all went down, they sided with Dad, and I went with Mom.

My mom answers my question. “I was going to call the therapist, but then I thought I should call you beforehand, just in case there was someone out there.”

“You know that’s not what your therapist said to do, Mom,” I say in a stern voice, a voice no child should have to use with her mother.

“I know, but what does she know?” my mom snaps, waving a hand— a perfectly manicured hand, since she still does her own nails once per week with laser-sharp precision. “She’s just some lady in an office somewhere. She doesn’t know what it’s like being here.”

“She’s a therapist. She knows what it’s like. She’s trying to help you.”

“She could help me by telling the police that sometimes I actually need to call them,” she says, and stalks off. Mom isn’t allowed to call the police anymore. I mean, she is, but they’re pretty over it and rarely come out. A thousand false reports will do that to you, I guess.

I sigh, because I don’t want to get in a second fight before noon today. If I had a single wish, it’d honestly be that I intervened with my mom long before now. I was so certain she’d snap out of it on her own. When she didn’t and I had to take action, the anxiety had become so bad that digging out wasn’t a realistic goal; her therapist and I just want to keep it from getting worse, which means I’m zipping over here three times a day to reassure her of one thing or another.

In the kitchen, I see that she’s got her computer open to a series of emails with her lawyer, all about my father.

“Anything new?” I ask, motioning to the computer.

“No. I was just rereading. Sometimes I think she knows things and isn’t telling me,” my mom says seriously.

“I doubt that’s true,” I answer. “Why don’t you try to go without reading these for the rest of the day?”

“I wasn’t going to sit here reading them all day. I have things to do too, you know,” she says stiffly. I nod, but am sure that she’s going to turn back to the emails as soon as I leave. She doesn’t plan to sit and worry all day any more than I planned to hit Heath’s car this morning, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

I have to check the yard twice more before I leave, taking the backroad home so I don’t have to go down the same roads I took this morning.

By the time I’ve gotten dressed and made it to Daily Grind, my coffee shop of choice, it’s nearly twelve and my co-workers are already hunched over their computers. People nod at me as I come in, a few small waves. They aren’t actually my co-workers; we’re all just work-from-home people who happen to like working away from home. It’s the closest thing to an office culture I’ve got, though, and I find I need that most on days when my mother is particularly bad. It’s like going out and socializing is proof that I’m not going to wind up like her.

“You look frazzled,” Bella says. She works for some sort of recruiting company and spends most of the day groaning at resumes with spelling errors, the most ridiculous of which she shares with me. I slide into the seat next to her at the long table in the center of the coffee shop.

“I am frazzled,” I say, shaking my head. “Fender bender this morning, followed by my mother.”

“Long morning.”

“No kidding,” I say, opening up my laptop.

“How’s your mom doing?”

I shrug in a full-bodied way as my computer boots up, then type in my password. “Same as always. I don’t think anything is going to improve until the parole hearing is over.”

“Yeah. Still no chance he’s going to get out, right?”

“No way. Dad’s gotten in so much trouble in prison already. They’re not going to reward that with a reduced sentence.”

I see Bella wince a little at the word “Dad”, and I get it— if your dad is awesome, hearing the word used for someone who sucks as much as my dad does must feel weird.

“Well, luckily for you, you’ve got my Halloween party tonight to take your mind off things.”

“Yeah. I’m excited,” I say.

“You forgot about it, didn’t you?”

“No!” I lie. I really, really forgot about it. But it’s barely even October, so who could blame me? It was the only weekend everyone Bella wanted to invite was available, though, so we’ll all be dressing up and drinking orange soda based cocktails tonight, the seventh, instead of on the thirty-first.

“Costumes are mandatory,” she reminds me, eyes sparkling. “Do you have one?”

“I’ve got something,” I say, which is only a teeny tiny lie. I’ve got some ideas for costumes I can throw together at the last minute. “How many people are you expecting? Do you need help setting up?”

“About twenty or thirty. Big for the size of my house. A few friends are bringing friends or brothers or cousins or whatnot, so that’s nice— it’ll be good to have some new blood hanging around,” she says. “Speaking of— is your car okay? Want to have my brother take a look at it?”

Bella’s brother, Jack, worked for a local mechanic all through high school, before he joined the military and traded fixing crappy sedans for fixing expensive tanks or airplanes or something else super impressive.

“Maybe tonight,” I answer, nodding. “At the party? Think he could check it out then?”

“Yep, I’ll let him know,” Bella says. I haven’t seen Jack in person in ages, but the photos Bella used as her phone wallpaper throughout his deployment tell me that the military got rid of some of the rough edges. You could tell from his smile that had developed from youthful cockiness to smooth adult confidence.

The exact same sort of confidence that Heath-the-total-dick had this morning, actually. The difference, of course, is that Jack is from my hometown, and Heath was a total stranger.

I hate the fact that I can remember an obnoxious amount about the way Heath looked; the way his shoulders seemed like they could carry the weight of the world, how I knew his chest would be hard and unyielding, how his hair was perfectly buzzed in lines as rigid as the musculature on his forearms.

If he hadn’t been hugely irritating— if he’d just apologized instead of blaming it all on me— I’d have been basically speechless, in fact. It’s not like I talk to guys that look like that all too often.

I check my bank account. Nothing in my “pending” list; he didn’t go straight to deposit the check. I consider, for a moment, putting a stop payment on it just to hassle him, but…then he might call the police or something. It’ll be more trouble in the end than it’s worth. Instead, I get to work, trying my best to forget the events of this morning— and I do. Sort of. Mostly.

Except for Heath’s stupid, awful, incredibly hot blue eyes.