Chapter 1

I held my grandson for nine seconds.

My daughter-in-law counted them out loud.

Then she took him back and wiped his forehead with a sanitizing wipe — right where I'd kissed him.

"We have boundaries, Nora."

I apologized. I'd flown eleven hours to be there.

Then I went home, and I canceled the black card, the mortgage, the lease on her G-Wagon, and the fourteen thousand dollars that landed in their account on the first of every month.

"You're right," I told my son. "Boundaries go both ways."

Let me back up.

I was in Seoul, closing a distribution deal worth more than my first house, when Grant texted me a photo of a tiny red face wrapped in a hospital blanket.

Bodhi Hawthorne Vance. 7lbs 2oz. Mom, he has Dad's chin.

I cried in a conference room full of executives. I'm fifty-four years old and I have not cried in public since the day I buried my husband.

I was on a plane four hours later.

I brought a hand-stitched blanket from a woman in Jongno who has been making them for sixty years. I brought Skye the Chanel bag she'd been tagging in her stories for a year. I brought Grant a watch that had belonged to his father.

I went straight from the airport to Cedar Ridge Maternity with my luggage still in the trunk.

Room 412. I knocked.

Skye was propped up in bed in a silk robe, ring light glowing, phone on a tripod.

"Oh," she said. "You came."

Grant hugged me too hard and too fast, the way he does when he's nervous. My son is twenty-nine years old and he still cannot lie to me with his body.

"Mom, hey. Hi. You must be exhausted."

I set the gifts on the tray table. I washed my hands for a full minute at the sink, because I'd read the article Skye sent to the family group chat, the one titled Twelve Things Grandparents Get Wrong.

Then I went to the bassinet.

He was so small. He smelled like warm bread and something older than both of us. I lifted him and he fit in the crook of my arm like he'd been made for it, and thirty years collapsed into nothing, because this is exactly how Grant had felt, and Daniel had been standing right there, and Daniel has been dead for twenty-two years.

I pressed my lips to his forehead.

"One," Skye said. "Two. Three."

I looked up.

She was filming.

"Four. Five. Six." Her voice was pleasant. Bright, even. Livestream-bright. "Seven. Eight. Nine — okay, that's plenty."

She held out her arms. I gave him back.

And then, in front of a nurse and a lactation consultant and eleven thousand people watching her story, she pulled a sanitizing wipe from the packet on her nightstand and scrubbed the place my mouth had been.

"We have boundaries, Nora," she said. "Kissing a newborn's face is literally how babies die."

My ears rang.

I said, "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

Grant laughed too loudly and said something about jet lag and steered me toward the chair in the corner.

There was a sign taped to it. Laminated. Card stock. Printed in a rose-gold script font.

SKYE'S SUPPORT SEAT ONLY.

No oversteppers or smother-in-laws.

I stopped walking.

"What is this?"

Grant smacked his own forehead. "Oh — Mom, that's not about you. That's for her mom. Skye's mother is a lot. 'Oversteppers' is her mom. 'Smother-in-law' is a separate category. There's an or right there, see?"

The or was the size of a sesame seed.

I am not a stupid woman. I built a four-hundred-million-dollar company out of a kitchen in a rented duplex, and I did it while burying a husband and raising a son. I know exactly what I was looking at.

I stood.

"Grant, I'll come back tomorrow."

"Don't be like that." He lowered his voice, the way you talk to a barking dog. "She just gave birth, Mom. Her hormones are a war zone. Just be more mindful of boundaries and everything will be fine."

On the way out, I passed the whiteboard the nurses use for visitor instructions.

Except it wasn't nurse handwriting. It was Skye's, in purple marker. A numbered list. BODHI'S VILLAGE RULES.

I only read one line before Grant pulled the door shut behind me.

7. Grandma pays. Grandma does not hold.