“Ivy—”
“When did he tell you?”
“The morning after,” she said, and then the truth began spilling out in pieces, each one worse than the last. Weston had shown up at her house shaking, smelling of smoke, with a burn on his wrist and soot on his jacket. He had confessed that he went to my building late because he thought I was at work. He did not know I had switched shifts. When he found no cash, he started searching drawers. Then a neighbor’s dog began barking, and he panicked. He knocked over a container of paint thinner from beneath the sink, or maybe it was already out, or maybe he said gasoline because he had brought it to scare me later. My mother contradicted herself so many times I could hardly follow the lies from the half-truths.
But the center of it was clear.
Weston had been inside my apartment.
Weston had started the fire.
And my mother had known.
“He said it was supposed to be small,” she said, crying now. “Just enough to cover that he’d been there. He didn’t know you were home. He swore he didn’t know.”
I stood up because sitting suddenly felt impossible. “He set fire to my apartment to hide a burglary.”
“He made a mistake.”
“A mistake is forgetting to lock a door. A mistake is backing into a mailbox. He could have killed me.”
“But he didn’t.”
The words came out before she could stop them. I heard the instant she realized what she had said.
The room went utterly still around me.
I had spent my whole life trying to earn a softness from my mother that she had no intention of giving me. I had made myself easier, quieter, more responsible. I remembered birthdays where Weston’s emergencies overshadowed my milestones, holidays where I washed dishes while he slept on the couch, phone calls where my good news was met with distracted approval because Weston was always somewhere burning down his own life. But nothing, not one memory, had prepared me for my mother weighing my survival against his guilt and deciding the important thing was that I had lived.
“You knew,” I said. My voice sounded strange, almost calm. “When I called you from the parking lot with no shoes and nowhere to go, you already knew.”
“I was protecting my son.”
Something inside me cracked so cleanly that for a moment I felt relief.
“I was your daughter.”
She sobbed once, harshly. “Ivy, please. You don’t understand what prison would do to him.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t understand what he did to me.”
Then I hung up.
I did not cry. Not then. I called Grant Holloway instead.