Chapter 3: The Ghost at the Feast
If you know anything about my daughter, it’s that she breaks rules she deems stupid with a straight face and a clean conscience. So when Emma called a week before Thanksgiving and said, “Mom, I’m bringing a friend home,” I didn’t ask if. I asked, “How many plates?”
There was a pause on the line—a mix of college static, deep exhaustion, and something else, something heavier. Then she said, her voice quieter, like a confession, “He doesn’t have anywhere else to go. The dorms close. The flight is too expensive. And… he eats a lot.”
I stared at the grocery list on my counter as if it had personally betrayed me. Turkey. Potatoes. Stuffing. Cranberry sauce. Butter I could barely justify. A pumpkin pie I’d pretend was “for the kids” even though Mark and I would eat most of it after they went to bed.
“Okay,” I said, the word a muscle memory honed by years of practice. It was the word I’d taught myself to say when a girl named Zoe first stood by my fridge in a hoodie during a heat wave.
“Okay?” Emma repeated, her tone laced with suspicion. She was waiting for the old version of me to emerge—the one who saw a budget first and a human being second.
“I’ll buy a bigger turkey,” I said, and I tried to laugh, to pretend this was normal, that this wasn’t the same story circling back to test me all over again.
