If there was anyone at that table I needed to patch things up with, more than with Chloe and her friend, Amelia, it was with my mother.
For seventeen years, she had been absent from my life after abandoning me, and now she seemed determined to avoid me, refusing to give me the explanations I so desperately needed.
It was with her that I should have been sitting, by her side, beginning to heal the damage I had endured for all those years and still had to endure due to her silence, her refusal to confront her daughter, and use an apology that no longer convinced me.
Was I not ready to know what had happened, as if I were not already a woman and just a few months away from legally becoming an adult?
What more did my mother need to consider me ready?
Did she want me to die with Chloe an
