Chapter 1: Homecoming Tides

The coast road was barely visible through my windshield. A long stretch of gray, cracked asphalt and gray, churned sea under this January gray sky. Mia’s text message burned in my pocket like a fresh, sick wound: “It’s over. You’ve found someone who can excite you more.” Just like that, after two years of what I thought I loved, she gutted me. I clenched the steering wheel. The salt wind brushed my face from the cracked-open window, taking with it the briny smell that always told me home was near. Home. Where the waves struck the shores on and on, eroding anything in their way just as time had eroded my family.

The house appeared in the distance. A two-story structure pieced together over the years, blue shutters coated with a film of salt. I parked in the driveway, my engine sputtering out with the same sound as the bleeding of my heart. Early twenties, back from college with a broken heart and no plan—pathetic. But as my duffel hit the ground and I walked up the steps, she answered the door. Oh, Mom. Elena grinned at me like the sun breaking through the fog, arms open.

“Darling,” she whispered, her voice husky and full, curling around me like lavender sprayed on her skin.

She pulled me close in a hug, a generous curve of flesh yielding to my own. Her yoga years had honed her shape, but she was still a woman, with breasts spilling onto my chest, a flare to her hips that spoke of soft mysteries. The hug lasted way too long, her fingers splayed and tracing mysteriously light strokes along the back of my neck.

“Welcome home. I’ve missed you, oh so damn much.”

I lay my face in her hair, smelling the salt-imbued mix of sea and musk that brushed my nose, thick and earthy.

“Missed you too, Mom,” I whispered, the word Mom too weak to do it justice, suffused with something I can’t put into words.

She drew back, her eyes almost without makeup, fluttering lashes dark and rich. She was glowing, forty-something, sweat dampening her skin, not yet dry from her latest yoga stretches, cheeks flushed with perspiration, a dusting of freckles. Her arms were streaked with stretch marks, shining silver lines that gleamed like rivers. They were just another thing to add to her mysteries, maps if you will, of a life that carried me, of the wounds left in the divorce we endured five years ago.