“Every time I came to your house, I looked for something wrong. Dust. Dinner. Laundry. Anything. Because if I could find something you were failing at, I didn’t have to feel so ashamed of what I was failing at here.”
I stared at her.
“You were looking for reasons to judge me?”
“I was looking for reasons not to judge myself.”
She looked around her kitchen.
“And when I saw you in bed that day… I finally had something I could use against you. So I did.”
Suddenly, eight years of tiny hums, inspections, corrections, and impossible expectations made sense.
They had never really been about my home.
They were about hers.
I stared at Patricia’s image on the screen.
Three days earlier, I’d wanted her humiliated.
Ten minutes earlier, I’d wanted to beat her at her own game.
Now I’d won.
And suddenly I didn’t care about winning anymore.
“Nathan,” I said. “End the stream.”
Patricia looked up.
“Claire…”
“We’re done.”
An hour later, Nathan and I stood outside Patricia’s house again.
This time, we knocked.
Nathan quietly removed our emergency key from Patricia’s key ring.
“You come over when you’re invited,” he said. “Not before.”
She nodded.
She looked smaller somehow.
Tired.
Then she lowered her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Claire.”
I waited.
Patricia had apologized before—for being “too honest,” for “hurting my feelings,” for things that somehow still became my fault by the end.
This time, she added nothing.
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s a start.”
On the drive home, Nathan reached over and took my hand.
“You okay?”
I thought about Patricia’s little hum and all the years I’d spent trying to avoid hearing it.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m done trying to impress your mother.”
Nathan smiled.
“Good.”
And for once, that was enough.
