Chapter 2

I didn't sleep.

I sat in my kitchen at four in the morning with a cold cup of tea and told myself what every mother tells herself.

She just had a baby. She's frightened. She's twenty-six.

I even googled it. Do you know what comes up when you search how to be a good grandmother now? Eleven thousand articles explaining that grandmothers are the leading cause of ruined motherhoods. That wanting to hold a baby is "ownership behavior." That the modern grandparent's job is to fund, drive, cook, and disappear.

So I decided to be modern.

Two days later they came home from the hospital to the penthouse I bought them, and I showed up with groceries, a postpartum meal service, and a night doula I'd hired and prepaid for twelve weeks.

Skye was on the couch, scrolling, in full makeup.

She did not look at me. She looked at Grant.

"It's a nineteen-minute drive from her place. You left at one. It's three."

"I was helping Mom with the bags—"

He was lying. He'd spent an hour in the parking garage begging me to come up.

I smiled anyway. "It was me. I bought too much."

Skye sighed like a woman surrounded by children.

"Nora. Covering for him doesn't help him grow." She finally glanced at me, and her eyes moved over my blazer, my heels, my blowout, and dismissed all of it. "Was there a woman in the car? Some little barista? Some cougar?"

Cougar.

I kept my face still. "Where's Marisol? The doula's supposed to be here."

"Oh, I fired her."

"You fired her."

"She kept touching Grant's arm when she talked to him." Skye rolled her eyes. "Some women just cannot accept their age. She's like fifty. Wearing lipstick, in my house. If she wasn't trying something, why bother?"

Marisol is sixty-one. She has eight grandchildren and the calm of a woman who has caught four hundred babies. She has never worn lipstick in her life.

The lipstick was for me.

"That's fine," I said. "You're the mother. Your call. Let me take you both out — there's that farm-to-table place two blocks over."

"Out." Skye laughed. "God, must be nice. You think money grows on trees?" She tipped her chin toward the kitchen. "There's food in there. Just make me something. Ask Grant for my restrictions, he's got them in his Notes app. You should memorize them too, going forward."

I breathed in through my nose.

"Skye. I don't cook."

She actually put her phone down.

"You don't cook?"

"I never learned. I was working."

"So what exactly is your plan here?" Her voice climbed. "You want to be, what, a guest? In your grandson's life? Every other grandmother in America is over here every day cooking, cleaning, doing night feeds, folding onesies. Every single one. But not you."

"Skye—"

"No, I'm serious. You're gone eleven months a year, dressed like a Vogue shoot, in Seoul, in Paris, in Milan — living your best life while your son sits in a two-bedroom with a newborn."

"It's a four-bedroom penthouse," I said. "And I'm working. I'm not on vacation."

"Working."

She said it the way you'd say cosplaying.

"You're pushing sixty and you're still white-knuckling that company like it's a life raft, acting like it's so hard, playing the martyr — and for what? So we stay dependent on you. So you keep the leash."

Twenty-two years of eighteen-hour days. The winter I ran the fill line myself because I couldn't make payroll. The Christmas I took a meeting from a hospital chair because Grant had pneumonia and a buyer wouldn't reschedule.

"You know what would fix all of this?" Skye said, and she smiled, and it was the smile from her sponsored posts, radiant and empty. "Sign the company over. Half to Grant, half to me. We'll run it. We're young, we understand the market, my audience is literally your demographic."

"And what would I do?"

"You'd move into the guest room," she said. "You'd cook, you'd clean, you'd do the night feeds. You'd be a grandmother."

Grant was looking at the floor.

"Say something," I told him.

He said, "Mom, she's not wrong that you're never around."