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He looks at me for a second like he’s checking whether I meant it. I hold his eyes until he seems satisfied.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Ready.”

The door opens before we’re halfway up the walk.

Laney Mercer is smaller than I expected, somehow — not physically small, just compact in the specific way of someone who’s spent a career on her feet and learned to move efficiently through small spaces. She’s got Theo’s dark hair, threaded through with more silver than I pictured, and scrubs still on underneath an open cardigan, like she came straight home from a shift and didn’t bother changing before we arrived. There’s a warmth to her that reaches you before she does — the kind of face that’s been kind for so long it’s simply settled there permanently, lines at the corners of her eyes that look like they came from laughing rather than worrying, even though I suspect she’s done plenty of both.

Her whole face does something when she sees him. Relief and love arriving at the same time, the specific brightness of a mother who hasn’t seen her kid in too long and is done pretending otherwise.

“There he is.” She crosses the porch fast, pulls him into a hug that he returns without a second of hesitation — no wall, no careful economy, just his arms going around her completely.

“Hey, Mom.”

“You look tired.” She pulls back, hands on his face, studying him the way I’ve watched her son study a defensive zone. “You’re not eating enough.”

I almost laugh. Because Theo is huge, especially compared to his mom.

“I’m eating fine.”

“Mm.” The exact same sound he makes. I catch it instantly — the specific inherited skepticism, passed down whole.

Then she looks at me.

I feel the assessment happen, quick and thorough, a mother’s radar running its full diagnostic in about four seconds. Not unkind. Not suspicious. Just complete, the way I imagine a good nurse takes in a patient — everything noted, nothing yet concluded.

“You must be Margo.” Her voice warms further, if that’s possible. “Laney. Come here, let me look at you.”

She pulls me into a hug before I can decide how formal to be about it. Warm and brief and entirely unpretentious. When she pulls back she’s smiling the way I imagine she’s smiled at very few people in her life who weren’t already family.

“He talks about you,” she says. “Which is saying something. This one doesn’t talk about anybody.”

“Mom.”

“It’s true and you know it.” She waves us both inside. “Come in, come in. I made coffee. It’s probably terrible, I’ve been up since five.”

The house is small and warm and completely, unmistakably lived-in.

Two mismatched chairs at a kitchen table that’s seen better decades. A couch with a blanket folded over the arm, worn soft from years of use. Photos on the wall — Theo at every age, in every hockey uniform he’s ever worn, one where he’s missing his front teeth and grinning anyway. I look at all of it while Laney fusses with the coffee maker and Theo hovers at the counter beside her, and I understand, watching him, that I’m seeing something I haven’t seen before.

He’s different here.

Looser. Younger, almost. Not in a way that reads as immature. Just unguarded, in a way I’ve only glimpsed in pieces — late at night, in the dark, when the wall comes all the way down for exactly the two of us. Here it’s down for everyone. He leans against the counter with his arms crossed loose instead of braced. He lets his mother swat his hand away from the cookies she’s clearly made for the occasion. He talks more — actual sentences, unprompted, telling her about the Frozen Four run with a kind of easy enthusiasm I’ve heard maybe twice from him in six months.

I sit at the kitchen table and watch him. A person who was a kid here. Who did homework at this table. Who grew up entirely inside these three rooms with a woman who worked doubles to keep the lights on. I feel something in my chest go soft and a little overwhelmed, watching it. This is the thing he wanted me to see. I understand now, completely, why it cost him something to ask.

“So,” Laney says, setting a mug in front of me and sitting down across the table, Theo still at the counter rifling through a cabinet for something. “Tell me about you. He’s given me the outline. Pre-law, cheerleading, very smart, terrifyingly organized.” She smiles. “I want the actual version.”

I laugh, surprised. “That’s fairly accurate, honestly.”

“I’m sure it is. I still want more than an outline.” She wraps both hands around her own mug. “What made you want to be a lawyer?”

“Nobody’s asked me that directly in a long time.” I turn my mug slowly in my hands, buying a second to find the real answer instead of the polished one. “Not like this. Not with actual curiosity behind it instead of a box to check on a conversation.”

“I’ve got time,” Laney says. “And I’m nosy. Go ahead.”

“I think I want to be the person who explains things clearly when everyone else in a room is confused and scared.” I hear myself say it and it comes out more honestly than I planned. “I grew up watching arguments get won by whoever stayed calmest. And a few weeks ago I gave this defense in a seminar — an ethics project, it doesn’t matter what it was about — and it surprised even me, how true it turned out to be when I actually said it out loud.”