"Whatever you say, sweetheart." Her voice goes soft. Warm in a way only mothers manage.
She'll have the guest bed made, a glass of water on the nightstand, and I'll end up staying. We both know it.
This is how we operate. She offers more than I ask for. I pretend to resist.
Neither of us mentions why being in the same house matters, why the sound of someone else breathing in the next room is a kind of medicine no pharmacy stocks.
We talk for another few minutes. Her job at the dentist's office, a funny story about a patient who fainted during a cleaning.
My statistics exam next week, whether the landlord is ever going to stop being a cheap asshole.
We keep it on the surface, and we're both fine with it.
Some conversations are better over coffee at her kitchen table, not through a phone speaker while I'm standing at my counter at six in the morning.
She doesn't mentionhim,and I don't either.
"Love you, Mom." I set the mug in the drying rack.
"Love you more." A pause, then firmer: "Eat something real."
I hang up and grab my bag and keys and lock the door behind me. Even test the knob twice.
Not because I'm paranoid.
Because I watched my mother check the locks on our house every night for years straight after the divorce, and some habits root themselves in you before you're old enough to understand why.
Campus is a twelve-minute walk from my apartment.
I could drive, but a parking permit runs four hundred dollars a year, and I'd rather eat.
Besides, the walk gives me twelve minutes to put my face on.
The public version. Head down, shoulders relaxed, face neutral.
Not unfriendly. Not inviting.
The human equivalent of beige. Forgettable by design.
Morgantown is a small enough city and a big enough college town to offer a strange kind of anonymity most of the time.
Fifty thousand people when school is in session, half of them undergrads who cycle out every four years and don't know local history beyond which bars have dollar drafts on weekdays.
I can walk through campus and be nobody. A face in the crowd. Saylor Bell, senior social work major, unremarkable.
Most of the time.
The Starbucks line inside the Mountainlair is fifteen people deep, which means I'm standing in one place long enough to be noticed.
I don't usually come here. Too crowded, too exposed.
But my thermos is leaking from the lid and Ineedcaffeine to survive Dr. Petrov's statistics lecture, so here I am.
The barista calls my name. "Saylor?"
I step forward to grab the cup and catch the eyes of the woman behind me. Mid-forties, WVU staff lanyard.
Her gaze moves from my face to the name on the cup and back.