My mother’s eyes darted to him.
“This isn’t the time.”
“It seems like the time.”
“Derek.”
“Did you?”
Her grip on her purse tightened.
“I may have said something like that because I didn’t want you feeling guilty. You had exams. Your internship interviews.”
I looked at Derek.
He looked sick.
“I didn’t have exams that weekend,” he said.
My mother’s face hardened, just slightly. It was a familiar shift. The moment vulnerability became control.
“You don’t understand what it was like,” she said. “We didn’t know where Sarah was headed. Eight years is a long time. We were afraid she was hiding in school because she didn’t know how to live in the real world.”
The real world.
I almost laughed again.
“I was building battery models and writing grant proposals while teaching undergraduates and sleeping four hours a night.”
“We didn’t know that.”
