Page 98 of First-Time Caller
I laugh and he stretches with a groan.
“I’m going to head back. You need anything before I go?”
I shake my head and follow him to the back door, leaning against the frame and watching as he trudges through the backyard, through the rusted gate we should probably fix sooner rather than later, and up the stairs of their tiny back porch. He waves again once he’s in their kitchen, and I flick off the lights.
The house settles as I move up the stairs. Sleepy sounds that move like a symphony. A song I know every word to. Floorboards creak beneath my feet and the door of the haunted closet at the end of the hall groans open as the heat kicks on. Warm air rumbles up through the ancient HVAC and wind whistles at the stained-glass window above the door. I poke my head into Maya’s room and I turn mushy and soft at her small but rapidly growing body tangled in the sheets, her arm flung out across the blankets. It’s the same way she’s slept since she was two years old and hardly sleeping at all.
I turn off the string lights crisscrossing her ceiling and she rolls halfway in her bed, a curved lump beneath her blankets.
“Mom?” she calls blearily. I wonder if I’ll ever stop hearing her voice in an echo of a memory, my name called out a thousand times through the dark. Maya then and Maya now.
“It’s me.” I slip through her door and perch on the edge of her bed, rubbing my hand up and down her leg. “You wanted to sleep here tonight?”
“Dad’s painting,” she mumbles into her pillow, not opening her eyes. “Too much Fleetwood Mac happening. And I wanted to see how the show went.”
“You’re very invested in my dating life,” I whisper.
“I’m the mastermind behind it,” she whispers back, slurring her words. She pauses a beat too long. “Obviously I’m invested.”
“Yeah, I guess you are.” I laugh. “The show was good.” What happened after, even better, but that’s not a conversation I’m going to have with my kid. Maya grumbles a nonsensical sound and I grin. “I reluctantly admit I’ve been having a good time.”
“See?” she mumbles, curling up farther beneath her blankets. “I’m a genius.”
“You really are, kiddo.”
I collect the book that’s open next to her and mark her page, then place it on her nightstand.
“Aiden’s probably happy,” she mumbles drowsily.
“About what, honey?”
“Your dates,” she says, voice faint, half-asleep and probably dreaming. “Heard you tonight. I bet he’s happy he doesn’t have to set you up anymore.”
“Oh yeah? Why is that?” I scratch my fingers through her hair, untangling the long strands across her pillow. “You think he’s tired of me?”
“No,” she whisper-slurs, her mouth buried in her pillow. “He likes you.”
“Of course he likes me. I keep telling you. I’m very likeable.”
“No, he likelikesyou.”
“Likelike, huh?”
“Mm-hmm. The internet says so.”
Maya used to sleep-talk all the time when she was a kid. She’d wake up all worked up, telling me tiny blue gremlins were making a colony in the colander beneath the sink. That owl people lived in the shower. This feels like that.
“That’s what the internet says?”
“Yup. The great, big, giant world, Mom.” She yawns so hard she squeaks. “Everyone is . . . They think you guys are great. Good. They’re probably talking about it right now.”
“No one is talking right now. They’re all asleep.” I twist one of her curls around my finger. “Like you should be. Get some rest. You can interrogate me in the morning.”
She mumbles something about blueberries and cottage cheese and the predicted life spans of gibbons and I slip out of her room to wander down to mine, my body tired but my mind running a mile a minute.
I know the show has been in distress. And while ratings have been good since I joined, I know Maggie wants more. It seems like a leap and something out of character for Aiden, but he . . . he wouldn’t have kissed me for the show, would he?
Lucie from a month ago probably would have let that thought linger, but I’ve learned a thing or two about standing confidently in my space since I started atHeartstrings. I pull my phone from my pocket and type out the number I’ve memorized. I hit send before I can overthink it.
