Nora checked his social media daily. “You’re really going to keep watching this?” Ben asked.
“I want to know what kind of person he thinks he is now,” she snapped.
Meanwhile, Mom kept cooking dinner for seven. The first time, she automatically set an extra plate at the table, then froze. I quietly removed it. “It’s okay,” I said.
“I know. I know. I’m fine,” she whispered—but she wasn’t.
One night, I found her staring at an old photo. “Do I really look that different?” she murmured. “Is that all I am now? Something that got old?”
“Mom,” I said firmly. “No. He did.”
She looked back at the photo. “I gave him everything.”
And she had.
We started stepping in harder. When she had a lawyer’s appointment, Nora grabbed her keys. “I’m coming.”
“You don’t need to.”
“That’s not what I said,” Nora replied.
Mom looked at me for backup. “You’ve handled enough,” I said. “We’re going.”
She looked exhausted, but something shifted that day.
Soon after, she took a part-time job at a catering company run by Mrs. Alvarez from church. At first, she called it temporary. But within a month, Mrs. Alvarez asked her to oversee a wedding reception. “Nobody keeps a kitchen moving like you do, Kayla,” she said.
Mom hung up the phone looking stunned.
She started changing—not in the way Dad accused her of, but in ways that mattered. She cut her hair to her shoulders. Bought new shoes. Laughed more.
We still heard about Dad through his sister, Lydia—the only one on his side who didn’t pretend we’d imagined what he did.
