The remaining days of the trip passed easily, the way good days tend to blur together afterward into a single warm impression rather than a sequence of distinct memories. We skied, or rather, James and the teenagers skied while Cordelia and I sat in the lodge drinking hot chocolate and watching through the big windows, both of us having long ago decided that our knees had earned the right to retire from that particular sport. We hiked a short trail behind the chalet on the second-to-last morning, the snow crunching underfoot, Benji identifying animal tracks with a confidence that was probably eighty percent invention and twenty percent actual knowledge gleaned from a nature documentary. We used the sauna every evening, the four adults taking turns with the teenagers, the cedar smell settling into my hair in a way that lingered pleasantly for days after we got home.
On our last night, Cordelia and I sat up after everyone else had gone to bed, the two of us sharing the last of the wine, the fire burned down to embers.
“Do you regret it?” she asked. “Pulling back on the chalet?”
I thought about the question seriously before answering, turning my glass slowly in my hand. “No,” I said. “I regret that it took me this long to notice what I was accepting. I don’t regret stopping.”
“I’ve wanted to say something for years,” Cordelia admitted. “About Yvette, I mean. The way she talks to you sometimes. But it felt like it wasn’t my place, and I was scared that if I said something, you’d just tell me I was overreacting, and then I’d feel foolish for even bringing it up.”
“I probably would have told you that,” I admitted. “I was very committed to believing it was fine. It’s easier, in a strange way, to absorb something than to name it. Naming it means you have to decide what to do about it.”
“And now you’ve decided.”
“Now I’ve decided.” I looked at her, at the firelight catching the side of her face, so much like her father’s it still occasionally startled me. “You never made me feel like that. Not once, in your whole life.”
“I had a good example,” she said simply, and reached over to squeeze my hand, and we sat there for a while longer not saying anything else, because nothing else needed to be said.
We drove home on the twenty-eighth, the roads clear, the sun bright and hard against the snow, and I spent the drive thinking less about Carter and Yvette than I expected to. Instead, I found myself thinking about the years ahead, about what I actually wanted them to look like, now that I had finally admitted to myself that I was allowed to want something rather than simply absorb whatever arrangement happened to be offered to me.
January came, and Carter and Yvette did come for dinner, the four of them arriving on a Saturday evening with Maisie clutching a drawing she’d made specially for me, a crayon rendering of what I eventually understood to be the chalet, complete with a stick-figure version of myself standing on the roof for reasons she couldn’t quite explain beyond “that’s where you’d want to be, Grandma, so you could see everything.”
Yvette was quieter than I had ever seen her, which in itself was something. She helped me in the kitchen without being asked, chopping vegetables for the salad while Carter and the children set the table, and partway through, apropos of nothing, she said, “I’ve been thinking about why I used your first name in that text.”
I kept chopping. “Oh?”
“I think I did it because it felt safer than calling you Mom and then having to actually explain myself to someone who deserved an explanation. It’s easier to disappoint a name than a person, if that makes sense.”
I set down my knife and looked at her properly. It was, I thought, the most honest thing she had ever said to me in four years. “It does make sense,” I said. “Thank you for telling me that.”
“I’m not asking you to put the phone lines back,” she added quickly. “Or the chalet thing. I understand why you did what you did. I just wanted you to know I’ve thought about it. A lot.”
“I appreciate that, Yvette.”
She used the word Mom for the first time in four years later that evening, over dessert, not loudly, just there, folded into a sentence about the recipe, asking whether Mom’s apple crisp recipe was the same one Carter’s grandmother used to make. I noticed, and I did not make a production of it.
We talked for three hours that night, long after the children had gone to watch a movie in the other room. Some things were said that needed saying. I did not pretend the past had not happened, but I also did not carry it into the room like a weapon. We found, without using the word agreement, that things would be different going forward. Yvette would call Maisie’s room “Grandma’s room” when we visited, not “the guest room.” Birthdays, mine included, would be remembered with the same care as anyone else’s. And the phrase money is tight would never again be used as a door closed in my face while it was flung wide open for someone else.
Whether they will stay different, I can’t say. That is not something I can control. What I can control is this: I am no longer waiting with held breath, hoping to be chosen by the people I have already chosen. I spend my Sundays now the way I spend them best, with Cordelia on the phone, with Maisie’s crayon drawing taped to my refrigerator door, with the quiet, steady understanding that love, the real kind, the kind that survives a bad Christmas and comes out the other side more honest than it went in, was never something I needed to buy. It only ever needed me to stop apologizing for expecting it.
Lila Hart is a dedicated Digital Archivist and Research Specialist with a keen eye for preserving and curating meaningful content. At TheArchivists, she specializes in organizing and managing digital archives, ensuring that valuable stories and historical moments are accessible for generations to come.
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