Page 176 of How To Be Nowhere
“Because you already are. You’ve been practicing your whole life—watching, learning, figuring out what kind of person you want to be. And Emma?” She cups my face. “You’re going to be extraordinary.”
I let myself cry then. Big, ugly, happy tears.
And Mom holds me, the way she’s held me a thousand times before. The way she held me when I scraped my knee at seven. When I didn’t get into my first-choice college. When I was nervous before my wedding. When life got hard and I needed someone to tell me it would be okay. When we finally pull apart, we’re both laughing and crying and wiping our faces.
“We should get back inside,” she says. “Before people think we abandoned the party.”
“In a minute.”
We sit there a bit longer, just the two of us in the cold September air.
And I think about beginnings, about how Mom started out as someone else entirely—Annemarie Collier, the girl who ran away from a wedding in a desperate bid for freedom. How Dad was just a grumpy professor who happened to be in the right place at the right time. How I was just a sad, angry five-year-old who needed someone to stay.
None of us knew what we were doing, but we figured it out together.
We built this. This family. This life. This love.
And now I get to do the same thing. Build something with Brandon. Create a family. Pass down everything Mom taught me about showing up and staying and choosing love even when it’s hard.
The circle continues. The story goes on.
“Ready?” Mom asks, standing and offering me her hand.
I smile and take it. “Ready.”
