THE CAR'S DASHBOARD clock seated into her eyes. 11:07 PM. She blinked. 11:08 PM.

Each change in digit was soul-crushing. A theft of seconds that Auden could never reclaim. Time, within the last few years, had become her executioner, marking the distance between decision and action like a funeral procession, which had marched it's way up to this exact moment.

Her fingers had welded themselves to the steering wheel, bloodless and twitching like autumn leaves before the storm, while overhead the great metal birds traced their inevitable arcs across Dublin's light polluted sky. Their engines sang of departures, of distances that could swallow guilt whole, and carry it across oceans until it became someone else's sorrow.

Her flight was at 11:30. But she was still in the airport parking lot.

It stretched around her like a purgatory, each empty space a testament to choices made and unmade. Her car was idling. There was no music. Just the sound of her breathing, shallow and uneven. Sodium lights painted everything the color of dying stars.

She should move. Should pry herself from this leather seat that had become her prison, should walk through those glass cathedral doors where LEDs baptized travelers into temporary anonymity, absolved them of their histories with the simple act of leaving. The Chicago flight would not pause for her paralysis, would not hold its breath while she suffocated on her own decisions like a drowning woman who had forgotten how to swim in the life she'd built.

Auden knew this. And yet her body had staged a mutiny against her mind's decree, every muscle locked in rebellion. Her limbs felt borrowed, foreign, as if she were watching herself from a great distance — this woman in the driver's seat, this stranger who had packed a suitcase, had slapped her husband, had left her children.

Inside her chest, something vital was fracturing. She could feel it splintering like rotted wood. She was a mother, a woman, an individual — each identity pulling her in different directions until she feared she might split apart entirely, scatter like dandelion seeds across Dublin's restless wind. Her daughter's face floated behind her closed eyelids: big, round blue eyes with a gap-toothed smile. She had eyes like his, but expressions like hers.

She wondered then, what was it like to be Catherine. What it felt like to behold the devastating certainty that mothers were permanent fixtures in the architecture of the world.

The phone's vibration cut through her stupor. Auden's eyes slid to to passenger seat, where she had thrown her phone a few minutes earlier.

Emma's name pulsed on the screen, insistent, nagging. Each buzz stabbed her brain, demanding acknowledgment, demanding presence in a moment when she wanted nothing more than to dissolve into the darkness between the parking lot lights.

She let it die into silence. Let it rise again like resurrection, like the persistent ghost of her own abandoned childhood. On the third call, her hands cracked like glass under pressure, fracturing along fault lines she'd spent decades trying to seal.

"Emma." The name escaped her lips in a breath that felt like she'd been holding it thirty-six years.

"Jesus Christ, Auden." Her mother's voice carried the weight of transatlantic panic, of a woman who knew the geography of abandonment too intimately, who had mapped every landmark on the territory of leaving. The connection crackled with distance, the static of unsaid truths that had lived too long in silence. "Cillian called me. He's beside himself. Tell me you're not doing what I think you're doing."

It was a question that was suspended across twenty-eight years of complicated mathematics — the distance between a mother who left and a daughter who might, the terrible symmetry of women who loved so hard they forgot how to love themselves. Auden could hear her mother's house in the background, that particular Wisconsin silence that spoke of solitude chosen rather than imposed, of peace purchased at the price of presence.

"I don't know what I'm doing," Auden whispered. The admission tasted like copper pennies, like blood. Like she had just fished out a rusted coin that had sat at the bottom of a wishing well. The words fell from her lips and seemed to dissolve in the car's stale air, becoming part of the atmosphere of her undoing.

"He said you packed a bag. That you're at the airport." Emma's voice carried the neutrality of someone walking through a minefield of her own making.

"I am."

Through the windshield, she watched another plane ascend into the sky, before disappearing entirely beyond a mist of a cloud.

"I can't blame you," Emma said finally. "God help me, Auden, I understand."

An image of her mother, decades younger, flashed before her. Denim jeans, white sneakers, a puffer coat. Her auburn hair frizzed and unkempt. Eyes red-rimmed and puffy. Suitcases cobbling against cracked pavement while her father begged on the front stoop. She stumbled into a yellow taxi, pulling away without a word.

Auden hadn't been there. Didn't even know how it happened. But it was a story she had visualized a thousand times; kept it close to her heart for days when it felt impossible to love the man her mother had left behind. The man who had only ever tried his hardest to support her for as long as he was alive.

Fuck.

Understanding was the gift she'd never wanted from her mother, the inheritance she'd spent her whole life trying to refuse.

"I don't," Auden murmured into the receiver. "I don't understand any of this. I don't understand how I got here, in this car, ready to —" She couldn't finish. Couldn't give voice to the magnitude of what she was contemplating, as if speaking it might make it inevitable, might transform possibility into prophecy.

The steering wheel under her hand felt like the wheel of a ship in a storm, offering the illusion of control while forces beyond her comprehension carried her toward an unknown horizon.

"I know that feeling," Emma said, her voice soft against the urgency that made Auden listen. "It's like you're drowning in plain sight. Like you've been hollowed out and filled with other people's needs until there's nothing left that's totally yours."

Auden felt herself nod, "Yes."

It was a simple, single syllable but it echoed in the car's small space, bouncing off windows and returning to her transformed.

"I lived in it for two years after you were born," Emma continued. "I used to stand in the shower and scream silently because even that small space wasn't mine, even that five minutes belonged to someone else's schedule, someone else's needs."

Auden closed her eyes, letting another plane carve its escape route overhead, its lights blinking like morse code against the Dublin night. "How did you do it? How did you actually find it in you to leave?"

There it was — the one thing Auden had always wanted to ask but never believed herself ready to hear the answer. Even then, it was heavy with implication. This was unmarked territory, full of tangled weeds that often refused both women passage.

She could feel her mother's hesitation, could almost touch the texture of regret that had aged like wine in the cellars of Emma's mind.

"Badly," Emma replied, and Auden was surprised there was no self-pity in it, just fact delivered as if she were talking about the weather. "I did it badly, selfishly even. But I've spent my whole life paying for those ten minutes of selfishness."

Auden glanced at the clock. 11:17. Her plane would be boarding now.

"Auden, listen to me — really listen," her mother continued. "Those roles you're convinced that you are drowning in? Whether you are someone's wife, girlfriend...a single woman. They're just costumes. Beautiful, terrible costumes that we put on to make sense of the world, to give shape to the shapeless thing that is a woman's existence. You can take them off, try on new ones, discard them entirely when they no longer serve the person you're becoming. They're not you."

Her eyes slid forward again, fixating on the bumper of the compact car in front of her. The trunk had a small dent, the brake lights clouded by dry mud.

"Then what am I?" Auden asked her, the question emerging from the deepest well of her uncertainty, from the place where identity had dissolved into a question mark that kept her awake at night, staring at ceilings that offered no answers.

"You're Catherine's mother. And that's not a costume," Emma answered. "That's not something you get to shrug off when it becomes inconvenient or suffocating or impossibly hard. That's bone deep. That's DNA. That's forever written in the code of who you are. It's as permanent as the scar tissue that forms around your heart the moment you first hold your child."

"I think I've forgotten how to be her mother and still be myself," Auden whispered, her voice barely audible above the ambient hum of the airport's hussle. "Like in my head, they're mutually exclusive. Like loving her completely means disappearing entirely."

"You will learn how to adjust. But you should learn it from home. Learn it with her still believing in you, still trusting in you. Don't make her question the fundamental reliability of the world because you couldn't figure out how to breathe inside your own life."

Auden almost scoffed, "What if I can't? What if this feeling never goes away?"

Her mother was quiet for a long moment, and in that silence Auden could hear the weight of experience, the accumulated wisdom of someone who had chosen the unbearable and learned to bear it anyway.

"Then you deal with that day," Emma responded, her voice gentle. "And then the next one. And eventually, somehow, you figure out how to breathe again. You remember that what you're feeling is only temporary. Abandonment is permanent. But you can't figure it out by running, Auden."

"I think this is an incredibly hypocritical thing for you to lecture me about," Auden snapped back.

But Emma did not take the bait. "You're right. But just know that the guilt follows you. It catches every flight, checks into every hotel, sits beside you at every meal for the rest of your life like an unwanted companion that never stops talking."

Auden felt herself exhale, her fingers curling around the phone. "This conversation is the reason I'm missing my flight."

"No," Emma said quickly. "No, you have had every chance to end this phone call and get the hell out of that country. But you know why you haven't gotten on that plane? It's because you're not me at twenty-six, convinced that everyone would be better off without me. It means that you know that love isn't just another word for obligation."

"Do you genuinely think that I have been better off without you?"

And as Aude asked this, it hit her – a realization so sharp it stole her breath. This was the same question Catherine would ask her one day, years from now, if Auden walked away. The same wounded confusion, the same desperate need to understand whether abandonment was love in disguise. The mirror of her own pain, reflected back through another generation.

"That's not the right question, sweetheart. The right question is: would you be better off without Catherine? Not easier, not simpler, not more free to pursue the ghost of who you might have been if you'd made different choices – that kind of better. Would the woman you are without her be someone you could live with, someone you could look at in the mirror everyday and not question what you are doing?"

Auden knew the answer instantly. It rose from the place where Catherine's laughter had taken root, where her daughter's small hand in hers had planted seeds of purpose that had grown into a field of blossoms and weed – lively and overgrown but beautiful in it's design.

"No."

Emma hummed over the line, the noise pleasantly direct. "Then you have your answer. You stay. You find another way to save yourself. You learn to breathe without leaving. You trust that the woman strong enough to love a child completely is also strong enough to remember how to love herself before her marriage."

Her car's engine remained steady. The dashboard clock went from 11:29 to 11:30. In the distance, a plane roared to life. It sped up down the runway, moving faster and faster until it's metal nose tilted towards the night sky, its wings streaming through the mist of twilight clouds as if flight itself were effortless.

It was her plane. The one that she had believed had held all the answers.

But believing was a funny thing. Truth is what set you free.