Chapter 1: Ocean Words and Quiet Warnings
It was an ordinary Thursday—one of those afternoons where the world feels soft around the edges. The kind of day when nothing extraordinary should happen. Tess, my four-year-old daughter, had just finished preschool. Her pink sneakers were kicked off in the backseat, her hair half-undone from the pigtails I’d carefully fixed that morning. A single fruit snack clung stubbornly to her leggings, and she hummed quietly to herself as we drove through golden sunlight toward home.
The roads were calm. The air was warm. My car smelled like apple juice and forgotten crayons.
And then she said it.
“Mommy,” Tess asked dreamily, gazing out the window like she was watching something beyond the trees, “will you cry when I go to the ocean with Dad and my other mom?”
The question landed in my chest like a stone thrown into still water—silent at first, then rippling through everything.
I kept both hands on the steering wheel, my knuckles going white.
“Your… other mom?” I repeated carefully, not wanting to sound alarmed.
“Uh-huh,” she said casually, as if she’d just asked me what was for dinner. “Mom Lizzie says you’re the evil one. She’s the kind mom. And soon, we’re going to the ocean with Daddy.”
I didn’t swerve, but everything inside me did.
My stomach dropped. My ears rang. I stared straight ahead as the world twisted beneath my tires.
“Sweetheart,” I said with a voice I didn’t recognize as my own, “who’s Mom Lizzie?”
She looked confused. “She’s always at our house. You know her, Mommy! Don’t pretend.”
Pretend.
Right.
Pretending was what I had been doing for months—pretending not to notice how Daniel had grown distant, how he left earlier for work and came home later. How perfume not mine lingered in the hallway. How laughter echoed in the kitchen when I wasn’t there.
But Tess didn’t know any of that. She only knew what she saw.
And what she was told.
I forced a smile so hard my cheeks ached. “Hey, want to stop by Gran’s for cookies?”
“Brownies?” she asked, her face lighting up like I’d just promised her a unicorn.
“Maybe all three,” I said. “Let’s go find out.”
We pulled up to my mother’s house—small, yellow, warm, the kind of home that always smelled like something baking. She opened the door before I even knocked, flour dusted across her cheek, a dishtowel over one shoulder like an old friend.
“You two look like you’ve driven through a cloud of trouble,” she said, pulling Tess into her arms.