Some days the missing is louder than others. This year, Finley doesn’t carry it alone.

May: The Quiet

I wake up knowing what day it is before I open my eyes.

It’s not the alarm that tells me. It’s the heaviness in my chest, like my body keeps a calendar my brain tries to ignore. Mother’s Day. The sixth one without her.

Maybelle is on the pillow next to mine, which she only does when something is off. Cats know. People debate this, but this is proof they know.

My phone has three notifications. A text from Barb: Thinking of you today, sweetheart. Come over for pancakes if you want. I’m not seeing my kids until this afternoon. A text from Mirna: You don’t have to be okay today. But you’re not alone. And a text from Alex, sent at 6:14 AM: Good morning. No plans today. I’m yours whenever you want me.

He didn’t bring up the fact it’s Mother’s Day. He just left the door open and let me decide whether to walk through it.

I text Barb and Mirna back with hearts. I text Alex: Maybe later? Going to have a slow morning.

He responds immediately: Take your time. I’ll be here.

I set my phone face down on the nightstand and stare at the ceiling. Maybelle headbutts my chin.

“Yeah,” I whisper. “I know.”

***

I try to have a normal morning. Coffee. Toast. A copy of the Sunday crossword that Mirna slips under my door every week, photocopied on her ancient printer, because she knows I like doing them and won’t splurge to buy a paper. We’ll compare answers later. Or at least we would on a typical Sunday.

I last about twenty minutes before I make the mistake of opening Instagram.

It’s a wall of mothers. Brunch photos and flower bouquets and handwritten cards and women my age posing with women my mom’s age, captioned things like My best friend, my rock, my everything. There’s a reel of a daughter surprising her mom with plane tickets. A carousel of childhood photos with the caption I don’t say I love you enough. A sponsored post for a jewelry company: Because she gave you everything.

I close the app. Then I close my eyes. I set the phone on the counter and press my palms flat against the Formica and breathe.

The thing people don’t understand about grief—or maybe they do and just don’t say—is that it’s not the big days that destroy you. Christmas was hard the first year, the second year, and then it became something I could manage. Her birthday is a dull ache now, predictable and contained, like a bruise I know not to press. But Mother’s Day is different. Mother’s Day is the whole world reminding you of what you don’t have, all day, everywhere you look, with the cheerful insistence of a holiday that assumes everyone has a mom to call.

I don’t have a mom to call.

I have a reindeer pin in a jewelry box on my dresser. I have a recipe for chicken and dumplings written in her handwriting on an index card stained with broth. I have a voice in my head that still sounds like her when I’m scared, saying, You’re stronger than you think, Finley.

But I don’t have her.

***

I decide to study. Studying is safe. Studying is productive. Studying doesn’t care what day it is.

I grab my laptop—the new one, which still makes me feel a complicated tangle of gratitude and pride every time I use it—to pull up my notes for Tuesday’s exam. Microbiology. Cell structure. Prokaryotes vs. eukaryotes. Things that are simple and have nothing to do with mothers. I place it on the kitchen table, then notice the corner of a notecard, peeking out from under my backpack.

I pull it out and see it’s a recipe card, yellowed at the edges, with handwriting I’d know from across a room. Mom’s Chicken & Dumplings — written at the top in her loopy cursive. Below it, the recipe, annotated with her notes in the margins: More butter than you think. Finley likes extra peas. Don’t let the dough get too thick—she’ll complain.

I’d pulled it out last night, to study her handwriting, just to feel close to her, then set it down on the table instead of the little wooden box.

Finley likes extra peas.

That’s the line that does it. Not the recipe. Not the handwriting. The fact that she knew me. That she adjusted a recipe because of something I liked, and she wrote it down, like my preferences were worth recording. Like I was worth the extra peas.

I sit down on a kitchen chair and hold the recipe card in both hands, then let the tears come.

Maybelle appears. She sits in front of me, close but not touching, like a tiny, furry witness.

I’m not sure how long I cry, longer than I’ve cried in a while, but enough to be significant.  When it’s done, it’s done—not because the sadness is over, but because my body has said what it needed to say. I wipe my face with the back of my hand and look at the recipe card again.

More butter than you think.

I almost laugh.

***

Alex doesn’t ask to come over. He just shows up around two, which means he’d been watching his phone all morning, waiting for my “maybe later” to turn into something more specific, and when it didn’t, he made the call himself. Even without permission.

He knocks softly. I open the door and he takes one look at my face—the puffy eyes, the old T-shirt, the general aura of someone who’s been wallowing—and doesn’t say a word.

He steps inside, closes the door behind him, and wraps his arms around me.

Not tight. Just… there. Both arms, his chin resting on the top of my head, one hand on the back of my neck. He doesn’t say I’m sorry or Are you okay? or What can I do? He doesn’t ask questions or offer solutions or try to steer me toward feeling better. He just holds me and lets me be exactly as sad as I am.

Three months ago, he would have panicked. He would have tried to fix it—booked a dinner, planned a distraction, said something optimistic that missed the point. But this Alex just stays.

We stand there for a long time. Long enough that Maybelle gets bored and walks away.

When I finally pull back, he looks at me with those serious eyes and says, “What do you need?”

Not what can I do. Not how can I help. What do you need.

He’s learning, and it nearly breaks me. “Just you,” I say. “Just this.”

“Okay.”

We end up on the couch. He sits in the corner, and I tuck myself against his side, my legs pulled up, his arm around me. The apartment is quiet. No TV. No music. Just the hum of the fridge and the soft sound of his breathing and the faint rustle of Maybelle destroying something in the other room that I’ll deal with later.

After a while, I reach over to the coffee table and pick up the recipe card.

“My mother’s recipe. She knew it was my favorite. I pulled it out because I needed to feel her. See a piece of her, even if it was just her handwriting and the notes in the margins.”

He takes it carefully, like it’s made of glass. Reads it. His thumb traces the edge of the card where the paper has gone soft.

“Chicken and dumplings,” he says.

“She made it on special occasions. The apartment would smell like it all day.” I lean my head against his shoulder. “She put extra peas in mine because I loved them. Which is a weird thing to love, but I was a weird kid.”

“You turned out okay.’

I laugh—a small, watery sound. “I hope she would agree with you.”

“She would,” he says with a quiet insistence. “What was she like?” Alex asks, still holding the recipe card. “Not the sad part. The… her part.”

And maybe it’s because he asked it exactly right, or maybe it’s because I’ve been carrying these stories alone for six years and they’re heavy, or maybe it’s just because it’s Mother’s Day and for once someone is asking me to remember instead of move on—but I start talking.

I tell him about her singing. How she’d belt out Dolly Parton in the kitchen, completely off-key, with total conviction. How she once sang “Jolene” at a karaoke bar and the DJ gently suggested she try a different song next time. How she sang it again the following week, louder.

I tell him about the Christmas thing. How every December she’d pull up pictures of snowy towns and say, “One day, Fin, we’re going to have a real white Christmas.” How we’d decorate our house with dollar-store garland and watch Hallmark movies until we fell asleep on the couch. How she made Christmas feel enormous even when our life was small.

I tell him about the reindeer pin. How she wore it every December, clipped to whatever she was wearing—a bathrobe, a winter coat. The one I brought to Hollybrook.

“I remember,” Alex says quietly. “You wore it at Beans to Go on your apron.”

My chest goes tight. “You noticed that?”

“I notice everything about you, Finley.” He says it plainly, not like a line. Like a fact. Like something he’s known for a while and hasn’t had a reason to say until now.

I press my face into his shoulder so he won’t see me start to cry again. He pretends not to notice, which is its own kind of kindness.

***

Around four o’clock, Alex gets quiet in a different way. I’m in the kitchen making tea when I hear him say, “I should call my mom.”

He says it under his breath, like he’s talking himself into it. I lean against the counter and watch him stare at his phone for a few seconds, his thumb hovering.

“You should,” I say.

He looks up at me, and there’s something uncertain in his face—the remnant of the old Alex, the one who kept his family at arm’s length for years because showing up felt like admitting he’d been gone. But then he nods and taps the screen.

Valerie King picks up on the second ring. “Alex!” She practically sings it. “Oh, honey. Happy Mother’s Day to me.”

“Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.” His voice is soft. The polished edges are gone. He’s just a son calling his mother, and the simplicity of it makes my throat ache.

They talk. Really talk—not the stiff, surface-level check-ins he used to do, back when calling home felt like an obligation instead of a choice. He asks about her garden. She tells him about a new rosemary plant that’s “being dramatic.” He laughs, and it’s the easy, unguarded laugh that I fell in love with in Hollybrook, and have grown to love even more every day since.

I stay in the kitchen, giving him the moment, but Valerie catches a glimpse of me over his shoulder.

“Is that Finley? Alex King, turn the phone around right now!”

He grins and angles the screen toward me. I wave, hoping my puffy eyes aren’t too obvious.

“Hi, Mrs. King.”

“Valerie,” she corrects warmly, the same way she did at Christmas. “Oh, Finley, honey, you look beautiful. I’ve been telling everyone about you. Listen—you two are still coming up in June, right? Because I’ve already started planning. Your dad and I found this little vineyard outside of town, and Mallory’s dying to take you to the new bookshop on Main Street, and I—”

“Mom,” Alex says with a laugh. “Breathe.”

I walk closer to Alex so I can see Valerie better.

“I’m just excited!” she says. “We all are. It’s not the same without you two.”

“We can’t wait,” I say, and I mean it so fiercely it surprises me. “We’ll be there.”

“Good.” Valerie’s face softens, and for a second, she looks right at me through the screen with an expression I recognize—the one my own mother used to give me when she thought I wasn’t looking. The one that just says you’re mine. “Happy Mother’s Day, sweetheart. To all the mothers, and all the daughters who miss them.”

My breath catches. I don’t know if Alex told her. I don’t know if she just knows, the way some women do—the way mothers do—but the kindness in her voice almost undoes me.

“Thank you, Valerie,” I manage.

Alex turns the phone back and wraps up the call with a softness that makes me proud of him. When he hangs up, the apartment is quiet again.

I stand with my back to the counter, holding my mug of tea.

“Your mom is wonderful,” I say.

“Yeah.” He sets his phone down. “She is.”

“You need to call her more.”

He looks at me, and I can see he hears what I’m really saying: You have her. Don’t waste it. He nods, slow and serious. “I will.”

***

At five o’clock, Alex picks up the recipe card from the coffee table and holds it up.

“Can we make this?”

I blink. “Chicken and dumplings? Now?”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s May. It’s a winter recipe.”

“Says who?”

I stare at him. He stares back. He’s completely serious.

“Alex, you can barely make toast.”

“That was one time. And your toaster is broken.”

“My toaster is not—” I stop. Because he’s not really asking about the recipe. He’s asking if he can be part of this. If he can step into the space my mother left and not fill it—nobody can fill it—but stand in it with me, so it’s less empty.

“Okay,” I say. “But I’m warning you, her dumplings aren’t easy. She wrote ‘don’t let the dough get too thick’ and she wasn’t kidding.”

“I run a tech startup. I can handle dumplings.”

He cannot, as it turns out, handle dumplings.

The first batch is too thick—chewy little rocks that sink to the bottom of the pot like they’re trying to escape. The second batch is too thin and dissolves into the broth. Alex gets flour on his forehead and in his hair and somehow on the ceiling, and I’m laughing so hard I can’t give him instructions, and Maybelle is on the counter eating a piece of chicken she stole when she thought neither of us was looking.

The third batch is… close. Not Mom’s. Maybe never Mom’s. But close enough that when I take the first bite, standing at the stove with the pot still bubbling, the taste reaches something old and deep inside me and holds on.

More butter than you think.

She was right. She was always right.

“Is it okay?” Alex asks, watching my face.

“It’s perfect,” I say, even though it’s not. Even though the peas are a little overdone and the dumplings are a little lopsided and no one will ever make it the way she did.

But we made it. Together. On Mother’s Day. And she would have loved that.

***

That night, I lie in bed with the reindeer pin on the nightstand. I don’t wear it—it’s not Christmas—but I like having it close. Like she’s in the room.

Alex is next to me, his breathing almost slow enough to be asleep. I asked him to stay because I didn’t want to be alone. The apartment smells like chicken and dumplings—broth and butter and something warm underneath that I can’t name but would know anywhere.

“She would have liked you,” I say into the dark.

A pause. Then: “Yeah?”

“She would have given you a hard time first. Tested you. Made you eat three bowls of dumplings and then asked if you were good enough for her daughter. But yeah. She would have liked you.”

His hand finds mine under the blanket.

“Tell me more about her sometime,” he says. “Not just today. Anytime.”

My eyes sting. But it’s the good kind. The kind that means something is thawing, not breaking.

“Okay,” I whisper.

Maybelle jumps onto the bed and wedges herself between us with the entitlement of a creature who has never once doubted her place in the world. Alex shifts to make room without complaint, which is growth.

I lie there in the dark, in my tiny apartment that smells like my mother’s kitchen, with a man who didn’t try to fix the unfixable thing but stayed anyway, and a cat who is taking up far more than her fair share of the bed, and I think about what Valerie said.

To all the mothers, and all the daughters who miss them.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

I hope wherever you are, you can see I’m not alone.