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“I didn’t mean…”

“Soph,” Everett said, putting his arm around her. “Your mom would have said the same thing.”

Sophie relaxed between us, and I put the bowl of candy off to the side. I reached over and took Everett’s hand, and we sat on the porch watching the last of the jack-o’-lanterns flicker on the street, while our daughter fell asleep between us.

March

I stood at the stove, flipping Sophie’s favorite thick-bread French toast when Sophie climbed up on the stool at the kitchen island, trying to reach the syrup.

“Mom-ber, can you pass the syrup?”

I stopped mid-flip and glanced over at her. She wasn’t paying any attention to me. Sophie had recently started organizing her food before eating it, making sure nothing touched anything else on her plate. I watched as she arranged the apple slices I’d cut for her in a pattern on her plate.

“What did you call me?”

“Mom-ber. It’s Mom plus Ember. I made it up,” she said shrugging as if I should have known.

I glanced over at Everett, who was enjoying his morning coffee. Like me, he froze when he heard Sophie call me Mom-ber as well. His eyes met mine over the top of his glasses, and I watched him carefully set his mug down.

“Is that okay? I still have Mom. She is my first mom, but you’re my other mom. My Mom-ber.”

I could smell the French toast burning in the pan but couldn’t move.

“It’s um…it’s perfect,” I said, my voice cracking.

I turned back to the pan and flipped the French toast. Seeing it was a little darker than normal, I plated it. I set Sophie and Everett’s plates down and put the syrup in the center of the table. “I’ll be right back.”

I made it to the bathroom in time for the tears to fall.

She’d called me Mom-ber.

I pulled my phone from my back pocket and called Jules. She answered on the first ring.

“Ember, what’s wrong?” She asked immediately.

“Nothing is wrong. Sophie…she called me Mom-ber.”

“What?”

“Mom-ber. Mom plus Ember. She told me I am her other mother. She made it up.” I sniffled.

Jules was quiet, and then she too, cried.

“That is so sweet.”

This was the ending. This was the ending that was supposed to be in the book, the one I couldn’t write because I hadn’t known it yet. When I came back into the kitchen, Everett looked up at me. He said nothing. He reached for my hand as I passed by, squeezing it once.

“Love you.” He said, as I sat down across from him.

“Love you too.”

July

The Book Nook only had standing room left. Ms. Shelly had set up a table near the front window, complete with a stack of hardcovers. The cover of Moonlit Mistakes gleamed under the shop’s lights. A silhouette of a woman standing in the doorway of a warmly lit house, with fall-colored leaves falling at her feet. D.E. Jones printed across the bottom in gold foil.

I sat behind the table, a black Sharpie in my hand, praying I didn’t look as terrified as I felt. The line snaked through the store. Most of the faces were familiar: neighbors and parents from Sophie’s school, the woman who ran the bakery, and the couple who owned the hardware store. Each one of them had read the book and had come out to support my very first signing.

I had spent weeks dreading this very moment. While I knew what I’d written was fiction, I still worried that every single person in this line would look at me and see the woman who had written about her boss. Instead, they looked at me the way they always had. As a neighbor, a friend, and someone who had put words down on paper that had made them feel something.