PRESENT DAY
The inn doesn’t shine, doesn’t light my way home. The R in Rose is dimming, and in the loss of its light, the once-name of this place, Peters, is invisible.
Behind me, the door to our house slams and defeats any chance I have at slipping by unnoticed. Grams peeks out of her study—a small room home solely to her vintage desk and the fairytale picture books she writes and illustrates. At the end of the hall, Nana sits at the table, eating leftover pizza and watching Gilmore Girls on the living room television.
Both of them read my face at the exact same time, and it happens in slow motion and too fast. They get up in synchrony, rush toward me, crush me in the comfort of their embrace. Hugs like this from my grandmas have gotten me through nightmares, intangible grief, and one terrible school dance, but they’ve never had to get me through a broken heart in quite this way. I don’t know if they can.
“I made my choice,” I whisper. I’m a mess of breathless sobs and unfinished melodies that have lost all purpose. I am exactly like my mom for once. I lost it all, and I deserved to.
“That doesn’t sound very convincing.” Grams rocks from side to side.
“We love you,” Nana says immediately with her usual confidence and forcefulness without knowing how I messed up the two things that mattered most. “No matter what.”
At this point, I don’t even know if I’ve earned that, not after how I’ve hurt Britt and Lost Girls and my mother. Their love is too good, too kind, the one thing unbroken by our story.
“What happened?” Grams says and pulls back a little, her dark brown eyes so open.
Nana’s arm wraps fiercely around my shoulders, and they both guide me to the couch where they sit on either side of me like they did the other night.
I struggle to find the words—any words. I can’t talk about Britt yet, not with the look on her face still seared behind my eyelids. So I speak to the other heartbreak in the room. “I failed Mom.”
“No,” Grams says at the same time Nana says, “Are you kidding?”
“She left me a hunt.” I pull the journal out of my bag. “That’s what led me to the guitar. I had to fill in the pieces, follow her trail. And I failed. Britt . . .” My tone trembles on her name. “We just finished it.”
“You didn’t fail her, Mia.” Grams swallows hard. “There’s so much of the good of her in you.”
Not enough. There’s too much of the other stuff. And I no longer know if that’s something I should revel in. My mother took for granted the people in her life, and so did I. I’m as bad as this town, claiming I want the real her and ignoring her mistakes, repeating her mistakes.
But Grams keeps going. “She was a free spirit, full of wanderlust and nostalgia. All she ever wanted was to escape. I never completely understood what she was running from, but as someone who had been running my whole life, I . . . I told her to go. I didn’t want her to ever be told she was too loud or too much or living wrong, loving wrong.” This last bit hits home, and I see the way both of my grandmothers tense, the way they reach for each other’s hands and my own.
We’ve all been running.
“She left.” Nana gives a hurt laugh. “I still wonder what we did wrong that made her need to get away so desperately.”
Grams squeezes her hand. “I don’t think it was ever about that.”
And this is what I needed all those years, to grieve her with them and not separately, to know something like they did.
“It wasn’t about that,” I tell them because they need to know. I recall how she didn’t call them, how the music distracted her, but it was never for lack of love.
Everything that’s happened this summer—save for my imploding supernova of a relationship with Britt—comes tumbling from my lips. I pull the seven envelopes from the book, and my grandmothers look with me. Grams’s eyes water as she flips through them, and Nana’s fingers clench her knees, knuckles white and mouth agape while she takes it in. I tell them where I’ve been, the destinations Britt and I reached and the things I discovered about her—the people I met.
“How . . .” Nana trails off, for once speechless. “I don’t . . .”
I hug my arms to my stomach. “The whole hunt wound up at her album Regret You. She was clearly showing me that she regretted leaving and meeting my father and . . . She clearly regretted me. Everything that led her to me was in this diary.”
The silence is thick once again. I’m left suffocated, waiting for the release of noise.
“Your mother loved you very much, Mia.” Grams says. Once again, she starts from the beginning and she guides us through a tale. When I was younger, we’d read exactly three books each night before bed, many of them her own. I can hear nursery rhymes in her voice like I can hear lyrics in my mother’s. “She came home while she was pregnant with you and, oh my, that girl had always hated studying and planning and following the rules. But for you, she did it all. She read every book she could get her hands on, wiped the parenting section of the Cove Bookstore clean. She painted the nursery herself. Your room is still the rose gold she chose. She was so scared. I’d never seen her that way. She was worried she was going to mess this up. I told her there wasn’t a chance in hell, and look at you now. Our brave, beautiful girl. You are everything she had hoped you’d be. You are.”
I don’t know how to believe those words in the memory of my actions and the bleak ending to the story she penned for me.
“I thought I was going to leave,” I admit. “When you told me to decide, that’s what I decided. That’s what I thought she wanted.”
“What do you want?” Nana says.
I shrug. “I don’t know.” Liar. “I was terrified I’d regret everything. That I’d lose myself and . . . and Britt, if we ever found the spotlight. I’m scared to leave the only town that’s ever shown me a piece of my mom. The place she was buried. Where I grew up. This house. I’m scared, and I don’t want to be a coward.”
“Then don’t be,” Grams says, like it’s that simple.
It would’ve been easier if their answer had been stay. Then I’d fall back into life as it was, let Britt go, let this go. I’d have to.
“How do you find the rest of her story?” Grams asks, and there’s something there, something that says there’s more.
“I need to talk to my dad,” I say before I can stop myself. That wasn’t in the clues, wasn’t in the answer, but I need someone who knows her in a different way, who saw things on the road that even they didn’t.
They both freeze.
“Why?” Nana asks.
“I need to know his side of the story.” I shift, bookended by them.
“His side is leaving you.” The angles of Nana’s features have never looked more severe.
Grams squeezes my hand once more. “You’re vulnerable right now.”
“You said you wanted me to know her.”
“Her.” Nana shakes her head. “Please, Mia. Let’s leave it at that.”
They’re still hiding him.
I retract my grip, slide off the couch, and stand, hoping they’ll see I’m not a little girl anymore, even if I still make a mess of things.
“I need to know,” I say. Grams asked me how to find the rest of her story, and that’s the only thing I have right now, the only thing I can control.
Except I can’t.
“No,” Nana says. “You’re not talking to him.”
“I’m eighteen years old.”
“You’re under this roof.”
All the pent-up pain releases. “Then you lied too.” I regret it instantly.
“Manners,” Grams snaps.
They sit on our old brown sofa with Stars Hollow paused on the television behind me and the window overlooking the forest of Sunset Cove to my side.
I stare, plead with my eyes, but they don’t bend.
Scooping up the story, I walk away. I shove my guilt aside because there’s too much of it right now. I slam my bedroom door behind me and I flop on my bed, but all I can think of is last night, that perfect night, as I stare at glow-in-the-dark stars on the opposite wall, around the mirror.
I study the way my hair falls to my collarbone, sandy blond. My eyes are blue. My T-shirt slips off my shoulder, and I look for those pieces of Tori Rose that have people recognizing me—not sure if I’m hoping to find her or miss her in my own features.
I remember every time I’ve held her album covers next to my face in the mirror.
Today, there are too many similarities, too many differences, too much of everything. I grab a facial wipe from my makeup bag and I scrub it all off—eyeliner, eye shadow, lipstick, blush, foundation. I don’t relent until I’m clean.
When I’m done, what’s left is just me, and I can’t look in the mirror any longer.