Page 30 of Come Break My Heart Again

Cormac leans against the kitchen counter. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did. Gotta be weird, being back here.”

“It is,” I admit. “But I’ll adjust. I’m going to work for Tuck. Help him flip that house he bought.”

“The Warren place?”

“I guess so.”

“Huh. Do you know how to renovate a house?”

I flip him off. “Tuck’s got a whole crew. I’ll just be pitching in with whatever needs to get done.”

“That’s what you want to be doing?” Cormac asks.

“I don’t exactly have a ton of options,” I reply quietly.

“You could apply to college. You got better grades than I did in high school, and I got into a decent school.”

“I think that ship has sailed, Cor.”

“Says who? There’s a guy in my Econ class in his fifties. He hated his old job, so he’s switching careers.”

“Maybe one day,” I say, mostly just to placate him. I wasn’t planning to go to college, even before my life derailed. “I’ll see how the construction gig goes.”

“She doesn’t want help, you know. Or treatment.”

My jaw tightens. “She might change her mind.”

“Maybe,” Cormac says, but I get the feeling he’s the one offering me false assurances now. “I’m going to stash this stuff in my room. Mom’s shift ends at six?”

“Yeah,” I reply. “She said she’d bring dinner.”

“Great. I’m starving.” Cormac disappears down the hallway with his bags, leaving me sitting on the couch.

My mom arrives home twenty minutes later with a few bags of groceries. I scrutinize her closely as I help unpack them, but she appears normal. Tired, with dark circles under her eyes, but no signs of sickness. As awful as it sounds, I wish there were signs. It’s too easy to pretend like nothing is wrong without them.

“I stopped and picked you up some clothes,” she tells me while dividing dinner between plates. “Figured you could use a few new things.”

“Thanks, Mom. You didn’t need to do that.”

“Would have been a long walk to the store,” she says in that blunt way she often speaks.

I snort before sitting down at the table. “Uh-huh.”

Cormac returns from the bathroom a few minutes later, and we sit down to eat as a family for the first time in a long time.

No one mentions the reason I spent so many years missing meals here. Or cancer. We talk about Cormac’s internship, and my mom tells a funny story about a customer, and I share what little I know about Tuck’s renovation project. It’s nice and normal and rare.

After we finish eating, my mom moves to stand.

“I’ll grab it,” Cormac says, rising quickly.

I sip my water as I watch him run through what’s obviously a routine. Turning on the electric kettle, grabbing a flower-painted teacup out of a cabinet, then pulling out one of the fancy boxes I noticed earlier. He shakes some leaves into the teacup, soaks them with hot water, and then brings it over to our mom.

“Thanks,” she tells Cormac, leaning forward to inhale the fragrant steam.

I still, suddenly realizing why the familiar jasmine scent is making me tense. “Since when do you drink tea?”

She shrugs, not meeting my eyes. “It’s good for you.”

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