The kitchen was too bright for this early in the day. Shauna hadn’t opened the blinds; Callie must have. Her coffee had already gone cold. She drank it anyway.

The fridge door was covered in magnets from places she never went. Her hand-me-down SUV sat in the driveway like a joke with a punchline no one laughed at anymore. There had been a time when she swore she’d never end up like this. She was supposed to be someone. Not this middle-aged mystery in a threadbare robe, half-heartedly Googling old Whitesnake videos when she thought no one was looking.

There was a time when she felt electric. Long before PTA meetings and meal kits, back when the radio played actual music and MTV still mattered. She could still sing every word to Careless Whisper, still remembered the sting of cheap eyeliner and the thrill of almost being caught. She knew what it meant to want things, back then. To really believe the world had something waiting for her besides suburbia and silent dinners.

Now, everything was muted. Familiar. Slightly stained.

The only unexpected thing left in her life was the kid standing in the hallway. Sadecki blood but too young to be bitter, too sharp to be soft. Technically younger than Callie, but never treated like it. Feminine in that effortless, sideways kind of way that didn’t fit neatly into categories Shauna had grown up with. The kind of presence that made people squint and ask stupid questions they didn’t really want answered.

They weren’t supposed to be here, not in the larger sense, not in the timeline of Shauna’s perfectly scripted life plan. But plans were fiction, and Shauna knew fiction better than most.

They shared the same nose. Same edge, too.

Shauna wasn’t a good mom, not in the ways she thought she’d be. But she didn’t lie to them. Not anymore. She didn’t have the energy. What they had between them wasn’t quite affection, but it was honest, which might’ve been better.

Because in a house full of ghosts and unopened bills, this kid was the only thing that didn’t feel like a rerun.