Wrestling Possums

"The fiercer they are, the more they feel. I've never quite decided if that's a blessing or a warning."

I had just allowed myself to believe the morning might settle into something manageable when the front door crashed open with enough force to rattle the hallway mirror.

"Mum! Mum, have you seen my Bartlett file?"

Rebecca's voice preceded her into the kitchen by approximately three seconds — enough time for me to close my eyes, take a breath, and wonder whether the universe was conducting some sort of experiment to determine exactly how many interruptions one woman could absorb before noon.

"I thought you'd left," I said, as she careened around the corner, her coat half-on and her curls staging a full rebellion against whatever she'd attempted that morning. Pins were falling out. One side looked vaguely professional; the other looked like she'd been caught in a wind tunnel.

"I did leave. I'm leaving again. I just need—" She stopped, scanning the kitchen with the frantic intensity of a woman whose entire morning hinged on a single missing folder. "The Bartlett file. It's blue. Or possibly green. Definitely has a coffee stain on the corner because I'm apparently incapable of drinking anything without creating a biohazard."

"I haven't seen it."

"It was right here." She gestured at the breakfast bar as though the file might materialise through force of will. "I put it right here last night so I wouldn't forget it, and now it's—" She spun, checking the counter, the table, the top of the refrigerator for reasons I couldn't fathom. "God. This is exactly what I need this morning. Helen Bartlett is going to lose her housing because I can't keep track of a single folder."

"Rebecca. Breathe."

"I don't have time to breathe. I have time to find the file and get to the office before my nine o'clock, which is—" She checked her watch and made a sound that was part groan, part growl. "Eighteen minutes away. Eighteen minutes, and I still have to drive through peak traffic, and park, and pretend I'm a competent professional who has her life together."

I watched her whirl through the kitchen, opening drawers that couldn't possibly contain legal files, checking behind the toaster, lifting the fruit bowl as though a folder might have concealed itself beneath the bananas. There was something almost admirable about the chaos — the way she moved through the world at full velocity, powered by conviction and caffeine, refusing to slow down even when slowing down might actually help her find what she was looking for.

"Did you check the library?" I asked.

She stopped mid-motion. "What?"

"The library. You were working in there last night after dinner. I saw the light on when I came downstairs for water around eleven."

Rebecca stared at me for a beat, then pressed her palm to her forehead. "The library. Of course. Because I took it in there to cross-reference something, and then I got distracted by—" She was already moving, disappearing down the hallway. "Never mind. I'm an idiot. A well-educated idiot with two degrees and absolutely no ability to remember where I put things."

I followed as far as the hallway, leaning against the doorframe as she reappeared moments later clutching a green folder — not blue — with a coffee stain on the corner exactly as described.

"Found it?"

"Found it." She was already stuffing it into her bag, which appeared to contain roughly the entire contents of a small legal library. "Thank you. You're a lifesaver. I'm sorry for—" She waved a hand vaguely at the kitchen, at the morning, at her own existence. "All of this."

"It's fine. You're fine." I reached out and caught her arm before she could tornado past me toward the door. "Rebecca. Stop. Two seconds."

She stopped, though I could feel the tension vibrating through her, the urgent need to be elsewhere already pulling at her like a current.

I reached up and unpinned the disaster on the left side of her head, twisting the curl into something that at least resembled its counterpart on the right, securing it with the pin she'd been about to lose somewhere between here and the car. She stood still for this, the way she used to stand still as a child when I'd fix her plaits before school — impatient but allowing it, understanding that some forms of fussing were simply what mothers did.

"There," I said. "Now you look like a solicitor instead of someone who's been wrestling possums."

The corner of her mouth twitched. "I feel like I've been wrestling possums."

"The Bartlett case?"

"The Bartlett case, and the Morrison appeal, and the fact that Legal Aid's funding is being cut again, and—" She stopped herself, shook her head. "You don't need my entire list of grievances before nine in the morning."

"I don't mind your grievances."

"I know." She softened, just slightly, in that way she sometimes did when I caught her off guard with simple affection. For all her sharp edges and righteous fury, Rebecca was still the girl who'd curled up beside me on the sofa during thunderstorms, who'd cried for three days when her first pet fish died, who felt everything so intensely that sometimes I worried the world would simply be too much for her. "I know you don't."

"Will you be home for dinner?"

She was already edging toward the door, the brief pause in her momentum closing like a window. "Probably not. I've got case prep that'll take me into the evening. Don't wait up."

"Rebecca—"

"I know what you're going to say." She turned, bag slung over her shoulder, keys already in hand. "I work too hard. I don't take care of myself. I'm going to burn out before I'm thirty."

I hadn't been going to say any of those things, though they were all true. What I'd wanted to say was something about her father — about the silence between them that was entering its fourth day, about whether she'd considered being the one to break it, about how much it cost Thomas even if he'd never admit it and even if he'd brought it on himself.

But Rebecca was already half out the door, her mind clearly elsewhere, and I knew better than to raise Thomas with her when she was running late and carrying the weight of other people's housing crises on her shoulders.

"I was going to say be careful on the roads," I said instead. "The weather's meant to turn later."

She paused, one foot over the threshold, and looked back at me with an expression I couldn't quite read. Something flickered across her face — guilt, maybe, or recognition that I'd let her off the hook when I could have pushed.

"I will," she said. "Love you, Mum."

"Love you too. Go save Helen Bartlett's housing."

And then she was gone, the door slamming behind her with the same force it had opened, the hallway mirror trembling in her wake. Through the window, I watched her half-run to her car, the coat still not properly on, the bag threatening to slide off her shoulder, the carefully-pinned curl already working itself loose.

I shook my head and turned back toward the kitchen.

Twenty-seven years old, I thought, a Harvard education, and she still can't leave the house without turning it into a production.

But there was fondness beneath the exasperation, and something else too — something that felt like worry, though I couldn't have said exactly what I was worried about. Rebecca was fierce and capable and doing work that mattered, fighting for people who had no one else to fight for them. She was everything I'd hoped she'd become and nothing like I'd expected.

She was also, I suspected, lonely in ways she'd never admit to me. The breakup with Ethan still cast its shadow, two years on. The long hours at Legal Aid left little room for anything resembling a personal life. And the war she was waging with her father — a war of principle that she was absolutely right about and absolutely unwilling to surrender — was costing her more than she'd acknowledge, eroding something between them that I wasn't sure could be rebuilt.

But those were concerns for another conversation, another day when she wasn't late and I wasn't distracted and the morning wasn't already slipping away from both of us.

I returned to the kitchen, to the cooling toast and the silent phone and the view of the winter-grey valley beyond the glass. The house had absorbed Rebecca's chaos and returned to its default state of watchful quiet. Somewhere upstairs, I could hear water running again — Brianne in the shower, probably, or Kain finally hauling himself out of bed.

The day continued its slow unfurling, indifferent to the worry that sat in my chest like something I'd swallowed wrong.

I checked my phone again.

Still nothing from Jamie.