A moment later, her phone buzzed. Emma looked at the screen and then held it out to me.
It was Sophie.
I’m sorry. I told my mom you could sit on my jacket. She said stop arguing.
So Sophie hadn’t simply watched it happen. She’d tried again after Vanessa drove away.
That changed something for me.
It was Sophie.
Part of me had still been trying to call the whole thing a stupid, panicked decision about a brand-new car.
But Vanessa had been given a second chance to reconsider after we’d gone inside. She hadn’t.
I ordered a rideshare.
The price made my stomach drop. Money was already tight, and now I had a dead car on top of it.
Emma got to school twenty minutes late.
I ordered a rideshare.
That evening, I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop open to repair estimates. Even the cheapest numbers made my chest tighten.
My phone buzzed.
Vanessa.
Car fixed? Sophie needs picking up at 7:20 tomorrow. I have Pilates.
I read it twice.
My phone buzzed.
Not “Did Emma get to school?”
Not “How bad is the car?”
Just whether I’d still be available for Sophie.
I put the phone face down and didn’t answer.
But for the first time in two years, I made a decision about the next morning. Even if the Honda started by some miracle, I wasn’t picking Sophie up at 7:20.
I didn’t answer.
I hated that Sophie would be caught in the middle, but that was exactly how I’d talked myself into saying yes for two years. Every inconvenience landed on the child unless I absorbed it first.
Vanessa was going to have to solve her own morning.
I expected an angry text when she figured that out.
I did not expect her on my porch.
***
