Serena’s POV
Some conversations wait for you at the kitchen table no matter how many years you spend walking past them.
Catherine moves through the space with the quiet efficiency of someone who has learned which cabinets stick and which burner runs hot.
She fills the kettle, sets out two mugs, drops chamomile bags into each one without asking if I want any.
I sit at the table with a legal pad full of dates, watching her move through this space like she was born to it.
"The preliminary hearing is set for Monday the fourteenth." Catherine pulls the kettle off before it whistles — a habit she picked up because the sound used to make Caleb flinch.
"Simon's contestation runs Wednesday through Friday the same week, so there might be scheduling conflicts with overlapping witnesses."
"I can testify Monday and still be available midweek for Simon's hearing." I glance down at the legal pad.
"Caleb's testimony is Thursday. We should make sure he's not on the stand the same day, so the judge gets two distinct perspectives instead of a coordinated front."
"That's smart." She sets a steaming mug in front of me and lowers herself into the opposite chair. "You think like a lawyer. Elizabeth always said you would."
The name lands between us with a weight Catherine doesn't seem to notice.
Or maybe she does, because her hands still on the mug and her eyes lift to mine with the careful attention of a woman who has been waiting six years for this conversation.
"You mention her a lot." My voice comes out steadier than I expect. "My mother."
"She was my closest friend for fifteen years before she was your father's wife."
"I know that."
"Do you?"
The question is gentle, but it presses against the bruise I have been protecting since I was fourteen. The clock on the wall fills the silence, each tick measured and relentless.
‘Say it. After six years of swallowing this, just say it.’
"I resented you for replacing her."
The words hang in the air between the steam from our mugs, bare and ugly and finally free. I watch Catherine's face for the flinch, the defensive tightening I have braced for since I was a teenager too polite to speak.
It doesn't come.
Catherine sets her mug down, wraps both hands around it, and holds my gaze with an openness that makes my chest ache.
"Tell me." Her voice is low, stripped of everything except willingness. "All of it."
"You moved us into a new house six months after she died and started a life like the old one never existed."
My throat tightens. "New kitchen. New curtains. New family photos before I'd even packed away the old ones. And nobody asked if I was ready."
"Serena—"
"I was seventeen." My fingers curl around the pen. "I hadn't even finished being angry at her for dying, and there you were, filling every space she left behind. Being kind. Being patient. Calling me bunny like she used to. And I couldn't even hate you for it because you were so relentlessly good that resenting you made me feel like the monster in my own house."
Catherine's eyes glisten, but she doesn't interrupt. She receives every word like she has been waiting for them as long as I have been holding them back.
"I know it wasn't your fault." My voice cracks on the last word. "I know you loved her too. But knowing and feeling are not the same thing, and for six years I have felt like every time you stood in this kitchen, a little more of her disappeared."
The silence that follows is thick, trembling.
Catherine draws a breath that shakes on the way in.
"I need to tell you about the last time I saw your mother." She pauses, steadying herself.
"Not the funeral. The week before she died, when they moved her to the hospice wing and your father couldn't stop crying long enough to sit with her."
I grip the pen so hard the plastic bites into my palm.
"I sat with her every night that week. I held her hand and brushed her hair when the nurses were too busy. And on the last night, when she was lucid enough to know it was almost over, she asked me for a promise."
Catherine's tears slide down her cheeks in two clean lines.
"She said, 'Catherine, I need you to take care of them. William won't know how to do this alone, and Serena is going to need a woman in her life who won't let her disappear into her own grief.' She held my hand with what little strength she had left and she made me swear I would be there for you and your father after she was gone."
The kitchen blurs. I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, but the tears come anyway, hot and relentless, pouring through every crack in the wall I have maintained since I was seventeen years old.
"It wasn't a casual request." Catherine's fingers tremble as she reaches across the table.
"It was the last thing she ever asked of anyone. And I have spent every day since trying to honor it without overstepping, without making you feel like I was erasing the woman I loved almost as much as you did."
"Why didn't you tell me?" The question tears out of me ragged. "Six years of me building a wall between us, and you just let me."
"Because you needed that wall." She wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand. "You needed to grieve on your own terms without me forcing forgiveness by playing the sympathy card. Elizabeth would have told me the same thing — 'Let her come to you when she's ready.' So I waited."
A sob breaks loose from my chest, graceless and carrying the weight of six years of silence.
Catherine is crying too, openly, and the sight of her grief mirrors my own so precisely that the wall between us doesn't crumble so much as dissolve, quietly, like salt in warm water.
"I'm not her replacement." Catherine's voice wavers but holds. "I never wanted to be. I'm just the woman who loved her enough to keep the promise she asked me to make."
I nod because words have failed me, because the seventeen-year-old girl who needed someone to explain why her mother was erased finally understands that she wasn't.
She was honored. Imperfectly, clumsily, through a new house and borrowed pet names and a woman who stayed even when staying meant years of a stepdaughter's quiet resentment.
The tears slow eventually. The kitchen settles. Neither of us moves to clean up the scattered tissues or the legal pad pushed aside for a conversation that matters more than any court date.
Catherine takes my hand, her grip firm and deliberate.
"There's one more thing." Her expression shifts, grief replaced by a heaviness that tightens the air. "I need to tell you about Simon. About what really happened when he left three years ago."
Her thumb presses against my knuckles.
"It might change how you see all of this."