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I THREW BACK THE LAST shot of the night and grinned as the music flooded through me. I could feel it pulsing through the dancefloor, through my shoes, lighting me up from the inside out. The noise was filling my ears. It was almost impossible to make out the texture or sound of it, but I didn’t care.
“You want another?” Lena, one of my work-mates while I was out here in Madrid, called to me, and I shook my head.
“No, I should be getting back to the hotel!” I replied, but I could already tell I was going to be out for at least another hour or so. There was a cute guy who had been flirting with me from the other side of the room for most of the evening, and I was starting to feel brave enough to go over there and say hola and see where it went from there.
Spain had always been one of my favorite countries to visit, and this time was no different. When one of my old colleagues called me up and said they needed someone to cover a major ad campaign launch out there, I had jumped at the chance. I had been in America for far too long, needed a chance to get out of the country for a while and blow off some steam, and that was just what I had been doing for the last couple of months. Working hard all day, and partying just as hard at night.
It wouldn’t be long until I had to head back to the US, and while I was looking forward to landing back on familiar soil, I knew it wouldn’t take much for me to look for my next adventure either. I’d always had itchy feet, way back from when I was a kid and I had looked around the small town I’d grown up in and decided there was something far more interesting for me out there in the world. I left when I had barely turned eighteen, too excited to see what the rest of the world had to offer me to wait around and hold out.
And damn, the world had so much to offer. I had basically bluffed my way into an advertising job in New York, and from there, I had built enough of a reputation that I had been able to bounce around the globe, heading up ad launches and campaigns and other projects. Other people had families and lives they needed to stick to, so they couldn’t just get up and rush across the world at a moment’s notice, but I’d never had that issue. I could do anything I wanted, whenever I wanted, and I’d gained a reputation in the process for being the woman to hit up if you needed something done a thousand miles away, and done well. I had started working with Angela Londson, the art collector, a few years ago, and she was the one who had gotten me this job in Madrid. While I was here, she had me looking at a few pieces for her collection, knowing I could talk my way into almost any of them.
I wasn’t sure where I’d be headed next, but I couldn’t wait to find out. The last place I expected, of course, was where I ended up. As my phone rang and I grabbed it from my pocket, I figured it was going to be something fun.
I looked down at the number calling me and furrowed my brow. I didn’t recognize it. Wait—yes, I did. Well, not the number, but the area code. That was—that was Maple Valley, wasn’t it?
My heart skipped a beat in my chest. Oh, shit. Had something happened? I hurried to the door, ducking out into the smoking area and lifting the phone to my ear. The throb of the club music was still beating beneath my feet, and I plugged my ear with my finger to try and make out who was on the other end of the line.
“Hello?” I greeted them. My heart was beating a little faster than it needed to be. Who would be calling me right now? And why? What had happened?
“Hi, is this Ellie Parrish?” a man asked me. He sounded stern, almost a little terse.
“Yeah, this is me,” I replied. “Why? Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Nate Burgess,” he replied. “I’m the doctor at the Maple Valley clinic.”
Doctor? Oh shit, had something happened?
“Is it my mom?” I blurted out. “Is she okay?”
I ran my hand through my hair in a panic, trying to calm myself down again. My mind was already rushing with possibilities. When was the last time I had spoken to her? I couldn’t even remember. Guilt twisted at my guts, and I did my best to shut it down. I couldn’t believe I had been so thoughtless.
“She’s not doing great,” he told me. “She had a fall. She’s in the clinic with me at the moment, but I’m not willing to release her until I know there’s someone at home to take care of her.”
I nodded. A fall? Okay. That was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as I had been expecting. Maybe there was a way we could get through this after all. Maybe if I just...I could hop on a plane and go home. I could do it right now.
“I’ll be there,” I told him. “I need to book a flight—I, uh, should be able to make it in by the end of the week? Is that okay?”
He paused for a moment, and I could tell it wasn’t exactly the answer he had been hoping for. But it was the best I could do. I was all but on the other side of the world from them right now, and it wasn’t as though I had been intending to go back to Maple Valley anytime soon.
“I suppose that’ll have to do,” he replied. How old was this guy? He spoke with the old-fashioned intonation of someone who had lived in Maple Valley all his life, but I’d never heard of him before.
“I’m sorry,” I replied before I could stop myself. I knew I didn’t owe him an apology for being so far away right now, but the way he was talking, I figured I would give him one anyway.
“Let me know when you’re in town,” he told me. “You can contact me at the front desk at the clinic.”
With that, he hung up. And I was left, standing there, outside a random Spanish club, feeling as though I had been hit by a damn train.
I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. My mother, she was hurt. Badly. Badly enough they weren’t going to let her out again until there was someone there to take care of her. I knew Mom would have done everything she could to push back against that, everything she could to convince the doctor she would be just fine by herself, but it wasn’t enough.
A fall wasn’t a death sentence, but she needed my help. And, though I had promised myself a long time ago I wasn’t going to end up back in Maple Valley if I could help it, it seemed as though the universe wasn’t going to give me a break anytime soon.
I hailed a cab and headed back to my hotel once I’d grabbed my bag and my coat. In the car, I started looking up flights and sending emails to everyone in the office; I was sure they would do their best to try and convince me to stay, but there was no way I was going to let them distract me from my mom.
I couldn’t believe something like this had happened. I couldn’t believe it. I had been away from home for, what, eight years? And now I was going back there, because something had happened to my mother. I couldn’t believe I had allowed it to go so long. Yeah, I hadn’t wanted to live there, but I had all but abandoned my mother back there as though I didn’t owe her a thing. I could feel the tears pricking the backs of my eyes as I thought about what she must have been through, how scared she must have been. She was stubborn as all hell, yeah, but that didn’t mean she didn’t suffer sometimes. She was probably struggling badly right now, and she didn’t want to admit it to the doctor.
Maybe she was the one who had gotten him to call me. If that was the case, then it was really serious, more serious than I could have imagined. I booked a flight and made it back to the hotel, shoving everything in the room into a bag and trying my best not to let my panic get the better of me.
I didn’t want to have to go back. I had imagined returning to my hometown, of course, a few times over—imagined going back there and the welcome I would get, how exciting it would be to share everything I’d done with the people I’d grown up with. But this, this was far from how I had pictured it in my head, far from how I had imagined it going down, and the reality was pressing in heavy on the back of my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about my mom, alone in the big house I’d grown up in, having hurt herself so badly she had to drag herself to the phone for help.
And...and she hadn’t reached out to me. She hadn’t even thought to. Because she knew how far I was from her, how useless I would be in helping her, even if I wanted to. That stung most. Because she was right—there wouldn’t have been a damn thing I could have done to help her, not from all the way out here. She would have gone through all of this on her own if it hadn’t been for the doctor deciding to go through her file and speak to me. I doubted he had asked him to reach out to me herself, and no doubt she’d be shocked when I turned up back home.
Shocked that her only daughter arrived to help her. How fucked-up was that? I pushed it down, tried not to linger too long on the thought. What mattered was I was doing it. I couldn’t keep beating myself up over the details, over what I should have done differently, no matter how tempting it might have been to keep doing it. I needed to stay focused. My mother needed me, and I was sure as hell not going to let her down.
I cast one last look around the hotel room, silently bidding farewell to it, to my life in Spain. I could come back when the time was right, but for now, for as long as my mother needed me, I had to prove to her I was going to be there.
She might not have thought she could rely on me – but I was determined to prove her wrong. I could be there for her. I could help her through this.
I could do it.
I had to.
There was nobody else who could. My mother, though she would never have said it out loud, relied on the people around her, and if we didn’t step up to help her, nobody would be there to pull her through this chaos. I might have been absent for way too long—I couldn’t even remember the last time I had spoken to her, actually—but I would be here for this.
The thought of the fall played over and over again inside my head, the pain of it enough to bring up old memories I would rather have stayed hidden. But I pressed those down. I needed to keep my head in the game. If my mom needed me, I was going to be there for her.
No matter what it took.
