I’d thought about going back down and sleeping on the couch again, but somehow, the thought of sleeping in the room where, not very long ago, everything had fallen apart was more than I could handle at the moment. As I stood on the landing, I turned and saw Linnie and Rodney’s room, the door ajar, and realized that since they’d gone back to the Inn, there was a room free for the night. I’d just gotten settled in and turned out the light when the door had creaked open, and I looked over to see Waffles nudging it with his nose. I was about to motion him over, but he was already crossing the room and hopping up onto the foot of the bed, turning around twice, and then curling into a ball, all with an air of detachment, like he would have done this whether or not I happened to be sleeping there. When I’d woken up, though, I’d found he’d moved a lot closer to me during the night, his head resting in the crook of my leg.

I stepped into the darkened kitchen, yawning, and opened the door to let Waffles out, noticing how only after a day, we already had our routine.

“Hey there.”

I jumped, startled, and whirled around to see my mother sitting at the kitchen table, in her robe, a mug of coffee in front of her. “Jeez,” I said, putting a hand to my racing heart. “You scared me.”

“Sorry about that.” She nodded toward the coffeepot. “There’s coffee if you want it.”

Considering I’d gotten three hours of sleep, maximum, I nodded and took down one of the mugs that still remained in the cupboard. I turned it in my hands once. It was a red Stanwich College mug—my dad thought it was the one that he’d gotten thirty years ago, when he went to interview for his assistant professor position, but J.J. had actually broken that one a decade ago and replaced it, and none of us had told him. As this thought flashed through my head, the weight of everything that had happened the night before came crashing down on me again. What was going to happen to this mug when my parents moved into separate houses? What was going to happen to the story behind it?

Halfway through filling up my mug, the dog scratched once at the back door, and I let him in—it looked like his paws were, thankfully, staying clean—and headed to the fridge for milk. It was packed with leftovers from the caterers, plastic wrapped neatly and fit into our fridge almost mathematically, like catering Tetris. I had just finished adding the milk to my mug when my mother said, “I think we should talk.”

I looked over at her and realized for the first time that she probably wasn’t up before anyone else, just sitting and enjoying her coffee. She was lying in wait for whichever one of us woke up first. “Yeah,” I said, coming over to sit across from her. She just looked at me, and suddenly I wondered if she’d found out about the near arrest outside the governor’s house. “About last night?” I asked, then realized this could be referring to many things.

“About what happened in the family room,” she said. I nodded, but my relief only lasted for a moment as I remembered everything I’d said to her—I’d talked to my parents the way I never talked to them, and the memory of it was making my cheeks burn.

She didn’t seem mad, though—mostly, in the cool morning light, she just looked tired. I took a breath. “Sorry for yelling like that.”

“It’s okay,” she said, then took a long drink of her coffee. “I’m so sorry you had to find out that way. Your dad and I had a whole plan . . . how we were going to tell you kids.”

“The rest of us, you mean.”

My mom winced. “Right.” She looked at me for a long moment, then gave me a smile. “I’m not surprised, actually. That you took it the hardest. You, my youngest, have always hated change.”

“No, I haven’t,” I said automatically.

“It’s not a bad thing,” she said, taking another sip of coffee, and I took one of my own as the dog started sniffing around my feet, clearly looking for some crumbs that had gone unnoticed. “Remember when you could no longer fit into your kindergarten dress? And how you cried and cried when you couldn’t wear it anymore?”

I nodded, even though I was mostly remembering the stories I’d been told about it, the pictures I’d seen, and the way it had made its way into Cassie Grant’s biography—how I wanted to wear the same dress, blue with sailboats on the collar, to basically every day of kindergarten, and how my mother had secretly bought three and rotated them. “Maybe,” I finally allowed.

“You don’t like to see things end,” my mother said, looking at me with a sad smile. “But if you don’t . . .” She trailed off.

“What?” I asked, in a voice that came out cracked.

“You miss so much,” she said simply. “And sometimes the harder you try to hang on to something, the less you can see that.” She tilted her head slightly to the side. “Did I ever tell you I almost kept the strip frozen in time?”

“What?” I just stared at her. I had thought I had known everything about Grant Central Station—but I’d never heard this before, not in a single interview or note in one of her collections.

She nodded. “It’s what my syndicate wanted me to do. They didn’t like the idea of everyone aging, kids eventually moving out of the house, going to college, Waffles dying. . . .” The real Waffles looked up at her when she said this, then plopped down at my feet, resting his head against my arch. It seemed like he was actually learning his name.

“So why didn’t you?” I couldn’t even get my head around the idea that we wouldn’t have grown up in the strip, parallel to life.

“Because,” she said, setting down her mug and looking at me, “it would have been cheating, in a way. You don’t get to freeze the picture when you want it. It would have been living in the past, and eventually, you just start doing the same jokes over and over again.”

I nodded slowly, clearing my throat around the lump that had suddenly formed in it. “So, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying,” she said, giving me a smile, “that you may not believe me—or like me—very much right now. But that eventually it is all going to be okay.” She reached into her pocket and slid two twenties across to me. “And that you should go pick up some donuts.”

* * *

Even though I’d drunk most of my coffee before changing into clothes I borrowed from Linnie’s side of the closet, I was still not feeling totally awake yet—which was maybe the reason that as I pulled out of the cul-de-sac and onto the main road, it took me a little longer than it should have to recognize the figure who was standing on the side of the road, shivering next to a suitcase and a leather duffel. It was Brooke. I unrolled the passenger-side window and leaned across the car’s console to talk to her.

“Hey,” I called. She looked up from her phone and blinked at me.

“Charlie? What are you doing out so early?”

“Breakfast run,” I said. “Um—what’s going on?” I asked, when she just glanced down at her phone again, apparently not in a hurry to explain what she was doing standing in the road with monogrammed luggage.

“I booked an early flight back to California,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “And I called a car, but apparently the driver’s lost. He’s about half an hour late at this point. I was just about to cancel it and see if I can get another. I have a flight to catch.”

“Are you going out of JFK?” I asked, thinking I could get her the number for the airport shuttle everyone in Stanwich used.

Brooke shook her head, folding her arms. “That little airport had the soonest flight,” she said, looking down at her phone again. “But at this point, I’m getting close to missing it.”

I hesitated for just a second longer before I leaned over and pushed the passenger-side door open. “I can give you a ride,” I said. “Hop in.”

Brooke just looked at me for a moment, like she was trying to decide if she should. Then she looked down at her phone, and maybe it was the time—or the utter lostness of her driver—that decided her. But either way, she nodded, and I shifted my car into park, and she loaded her bags into the back.