MJ couldn't seem to bring herself to eat the cherry pie she had crafted with her own two hands.

Well—that wasn't entirely true, was it?

She stared down at the ruined baked good, smashed onto the kitchen floor like something sacred desecrated. The crust had been perfect once—golden brown and flaky, each layer visible where she'd folded the butter into the dough, worked it with patient hands until it was just right. She'd even hand-cut little decorative leaves and cherries from the excess dough, arranged them on top in a pattern her mother used to make, the kind of detail that turned baking from necessity into art.

Now it was nothing but wreckage.

The lattice top had cracked and caved in on itself, all those perfect strips of dough she'd woven over and under, over and under, now crushed beyond recognition. Liquified cherries were spilling onto the tiles, spreading in a slow crimson tide, glazing the floor with a deep red that was almost beautiful in a terrible sort of way. Like blood. Like sunset. Like the end of something.

She couldn't remember if she had intentionally dropped it, or if it had just slipped through her fingers the way her mother had.

One moment she'd been holding it—the pie plate warm through the kitchen towel, the smell of sugar and cinnamon still rising from it in delicate wisps of steam. The next moment it was falling, and she was watching it fall, watching it tip and tumble through the air in slow motion, and she couldn't say for certain if her hands had simply opened or if she'd thrown it down in a moment of rage or grief so consuming she'd lost herself entirely.

Both felt true. Neither felt like a lie.

There was an empty pit in her stomach. It was emptier than the feeling of hands once wrapping themselves around her, emptier than the kitchen when her mother stopped humming while she cooked, emptier than Sunday mornings without the ritual of getting dressed up for mass.

Her father had been mad at her. More than mad—furious in that quiet, cold way that was somehow worse than yelling.

He was mad at her for bringing cherry pie back into this house. Mad for dredging up old memories of the family piling into the truck after Sunday mass, still dressed in their church clothes, heading to Dot's Diner where Mama would order cherry pie to take home. Mad for the way the smell filled the kitchen the same way it used to.

"Your mama's dead, Marie Jane. All you're doing is making it hurt worse."

He'd left her standing there, alone in the kitchen with flour on her hands and her heart cracked open like an egg, and she'd stood there just staring at the pie on the counter.

And then it was on the floor.

She was honestly a little mad at herself too.

When {{user}} entered the room, she had been squatted down on the floor, fork clutched in one hand.

She'd found a piece of the pie that wasn't touching the ground—a small section near the edge where the crust had stayed mostly intact, where the cherries were still glossy and perfect. Without really thinking, without really deciding, she'd speared it with the fork and brought it to her mouth. It tasted exactly right. It tasted like summer and love and every Sunday afternoon that would never come again.

There were tears in her eyes that she could not explain.

Or maybe she could explain them too well—could list every reason why they were there, catalog them like items on one of her endless to-do lists. Grief. Frustration. Loneliness. The ache of trying so hard to hold everything together when she was only twenty-one and so tired she could barely remember what it felt like not to be tired.

She took another bite of pie off the floor, and the tears spilled over, dripping off her chin to join the cherry juice spreading across the tiles.

She didn't look up at {{user}}. Couldn't bear to see what expression they might be wearing. Instead she just sat there in the wreckage of her good intentions, eating pie off the floor like some sort of penance, like if she could just taste what she'd lost maybe it would hurt less.

It didn't.

It never did.