Free Someone Like You by Barbara Bretton Page B

international signal for I don’t want to talk about this anymore .
    “I’m sorry I’m not there with you. If you’d like, I can fly home, and we’ll go together.”
    “What for?” she said before she had a chance to censor herself. “What I mean is, I’ll go there, sign a few papers, and come right home. No reason to disrupt your schedule.”
    “You shouldn’t have to go through this alone.”
    “It’s no big deal, William. My mother specializes in catastrophes. They’re practically daily occurrences.”
    “We’ve been together four years,” he reminded her, “and this is the first time you’ve had to fly back to the States because of one.”
    “Cat called in an old favor,” she said. “I don’t really have a choice.”
    “Why don’t you call in an old favor and ask Sara to look after Annabelle.”
    “Sara and Hugh leave for London in the morning.”
    Another one of those unnerving silences. When had they become part of their intimate language?
    “William, please, if you’re at all uncomfortable about my taking Annabelle to Maine—”
    “No,” he said quickly. “It’s not that.”
    He had his reasons, and they all made perfect sense. Annabelle was a handful. Annabelle could be disruptive on a plane. Annabelle was an easy substitute for all the things they couldn’t say.
    She gave him her itinerary, complete with addresses and phone numbers. He gave her the name of his hotel and his room number. He hoped to be home by the end of the following week. She intended to be back long before.
    Finally there was nothing—and everything—left to say.
    “The car will be here in a few hours, William, and I still have to pack and dig up our passports.”
    “I’ll let you get on with it then,” he said. “Kiss Annabelle for me.”
    “Hurry home.”
    “You, too.”
    And just like that, they retreated to their separate corners of the world.

Chapter Six
    Idle Point
     
    “WE WERE JUST about to wheel her in,” the nurse said as Cat stepped from the elevator on the second floor. “Mary and I delayed as long as we could.”
    “Am I too late?” For some crazy reason they had been looking for her in the cafeteria instead of surgical waiting where she had been told to sit.
    “Not if we run.”
    The nurse wasn’t kidding. If Cat had been able to run this fast in high school, she would have made the track team.
    “She’s out cold,” the nurse said as she elbowed her way into an anteroom outside the OR. “Once those pre-op meds take hold, they don’t know which end is up.”
    Cat nodded and moved closer to the slight figure on the gurney. It looked like Mimi and it didn’t, more like one of those wax figures at Madame Tussauds. A horrible sense of foreboding washed over her.
    She bent down close to Mimi’s ear, trying very hard not to notice the toll life had exacted from her once-glowing beauty. Mimi looked far older than her sixty-two years, easily a decade or more. Loneliness. Drink. Demons only she could see and hear.
    “I’m here, Mom,” she whispered. “You’re not alone.”
    The nurse tapped her on the shoulder. “Green is chomping at the bit. I need to get Mrs. Doyle in before Green takes my appendix out with a soup spoon.”
    “How dangerous is the surgery?”
    The nurse made a face as she adjusted the IV drip that fed into Mimi’s right arm. “Not very. She’ll be fine, honey.”
    Mimi had never been fine. Their world had always been governed by her mood swings, her fears, her emptiness. She existed in a place only she could find, suspended between the past and some version of the future only she could see.
    Cat wanted to feel the things a daughter was supposed to feel for the mother who gave her life, but she didn’t. Once, in her early twenties, she spent some time in therapy trying to unlock her heart, but even the therapist had to admit that love wasn’t always a given. She cared for Mimi because she was her mother. She believed in the bonds of family. But if you asked