A lifetime of following my mother’s every piece of advice ticker-taped through my head. A lifetime of never questioning her type-A standards, and working like a dog to meet them, and internalizing them without question. In that moment, possibly for the first time ever, it occurred to me: She didn’t know everything. She didn’t have it all figured out. I’d followed her instructions for life to the letter, and look where it had gotten me: right here, trapped in this bed, enduring stories about ballerinas. She said take advanced calculus? I took advanced calculus. She said major in business administration? I majored in business administration. She said get an MBA? I got an MBA. Top of the class. Always. Every time. Like a chump.

Sitting there, I tried to scan back for even one time—one tiny time—that I’d rejected her “help” and done my own thing. That’s all Kitty had ever done, by the way—reject my mother’s advice—and it had made her teen years in our house pretty miserable for everybody. But had it made Kitty’s life miserable? Sure, she’d been through some rough times, and she had a crazy hairdo, and way too many piercings, and a defiantly funky lifestyle—but she was always, unapologetically Kitty. She knew who she was. She did what she loved. Who was I? What was I good at, besides keeping my apartment neat, and keeping myself groomed, and acing tests? What did I like? What was I passionate about? What would it feel like to do what I wanted instead of what was expected?

I had no earthly idea.

“No,” I heard myself say then.

My mother blinked at me.

“No thanks, I mean. I don’t need a tutor.”

“I’m not sure you see the time pressure here,” my mother said.

“I think I do.”

“In exactly three weeks, your window of opportunity will slam closed.”

“Maybe not slam,” my dad amended.

But my mom was irritated now. “Don’t you want to get better?”

“I can’t believe you would even ask me that.”

“Because right now it doesn’t seem like you do.”

I looked at my dad for help.

He jumped in. “Maybe we just need to redefine ‘better.’”

“‘Better’ doesn’t need to be redefined,” my mom said. “It is what it is. It’s better.”

“Unless,” I said, “it’s you applying it to me. Then ‘better’ means ‘fixed.’ As you’ve promised all the neighbors.”

She held her position. “Don’t you want to be fixed?”

“That’s not a relevant question.”

But she lifted one eyebrow the way she always did when she was about to win. “It’s the only relevant question there is.”

Sure, she had a point. There were some real, physical issues here that I needed to address in a timely way, and now might not be the best moment to give up. But I realized then—possibly for the first time ever—that my parents telling me what to do was making it harder, not easier, to figure out what to do. It was just a glimpse of a feeling, but I now grasped that it was my job—and only mine—to try.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I heard myself say.

“Fine,” my mother said. “We’ll take a break.”

I shook my head. “At all. Period. I’m not going to discuss any of this with you.” My voice, I noticed, sounded just like my mother’s when she was declaring the case closed. “If you want to come have lunch every day and see me, great. But the topic of my recovery is off-limits.”

My mother looked at my dad.

“If you try to bring it up,” I went on, “I will scream until you leave the room.” In my old life, I might have left the room myself—but now that wasn’t an option. “And if that doesn’t work,” I said, adding the thing my mother hated the most, “I will burst into show tunes.”

I could almost see her shiver. “Fine,” she said.

“I have to figure this out,” I said, my voice a little softer as I looked over at my dad. “You can’t do it for me. I have to do it myself.”

I could see a hundred protests forming in my mother’s head. Most notably: What if I did it myself—and did it wrong? She had a point. Even I wondered if this was really the best moment to thrust myself out of her nest. Weren’t the stakes a little high? Shouldn’t we start with what to eat for dinner and work our way up? But I let the questions go unanswered. For the first time ever, I didn’t care. This was bigger than me.

This was my mangled body and my hopeless soul, stepping up at last.

Eighteen

STANDING UP TO my mother was surprisingly elating. In a life as out of control as mine was at that moment, little things can be big.

When Ian showed up for PT, I went with him willingly. He didn’t talk, and neither did I, but as we worked our way through stretches, and the stationary bike, and a machine I called the “Thighmaster,” I did everything he asked with a new kind of determination.

Neither one of us talked this time, and the vibe was decidedly different than it had been. Instead of babbling incessantly to fill the silence, I concentrated on my task at hand. Instead of staring out the window, he watched my form and—of all things—helped me.

“Good,” he’d say, as the weights on the machine went up. “That’s it.”

“Are you encouraging me?” I said, not looking over.

I felt, rather than saw, him give a little smile. “Nope.”

Even Myles couldn’t slow us down. He passed by several times to correct my form and then demand to know why Ian wasn’t paying better attention. He also pointed out that Ian’s scrubs weren’t regulation blue—even though they were barely a shade lighter than the ones Myles himself was wearing. At one point, Myles came by for no other reason than to let Ian know he had been “missed at the staff meeting this morning.”

Ian didn’t look at him. “I was not told about that meeting.”

Myles gave him a look, like, Please. “Pretty sure you were. There was a staff-wide email.”

“I didn’t get it.”

“You’re saying every single member of our team got that message but you?”

“Looks that way.”

“I think maybe you just don’t like meetings.”

“I detest meetings,” Ian said, standing up to full height and looking down at Myles. “Especially bullshit meetings that waste everyone’s time. But I never miss them—unless someone deletes my address from the recipients list.”

I caught a flash of busted cross Myles’s face. Then he regrouped. “I’ve started taking roll,” he said then. “So you’ll want to be sure to make it to the next one. On time.”

“With pleasure,” Ian said, turning away.

“Did he delete your name from the email list?” I whispered, after Myles was gone.

“No comment.”

“How are you going to make it to the next one if he doesn’t tell you about it?”

Ian met my eyes. “I’ve alerted my network of spies.”

*

AFTER PT, I was so tired I could barely transfer back to the bed.

I took a coma-like nap, and when I woke, around the time Kitty usually arrived for supper, I was ravenously hungry. I was also ready to report on how I’d both stood up to our mom and rocked it out in PT—and then psychoanalyze how those two things might be related.

But when the door opened, it wasn’t Kitty.

It was Ian.

My first thought: He was quitting. He couldn’t take me—or Myles—anymore.

He walked close to the bed and stood there, a bit uncomfortable.

I decided to jump the gun. “I’m sorry I’ve been so difficult lately,” I said.

“Your situation is difficult,” he said then. “Not you.”

That was nice of him.

“I think you’re coping remarkably well, actually,” he said.

“You do?”

He nodded. “You worked hard today.”

“I did?”

“Could you feel the difference?”

The question sparked a realization. This might have been the first time in my life that I did something difficult not for how it would matter to somebody else, but for how it would matter to me.

It was a strange, new feeling, but it felt like a little nudge in the right direction.

“It was different,” I agreed. “But I’m not sure why.”

“You’ve got a lot of strength, Maggie,” Ian said then. Such a serious face. Practically mournful. “Much more than you realize.”

“I hope so. I’m going to need it.”

“And I think we could be doing more.”

Where was he going with this? “Okay.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Here now, you mean?”

“Your father hired me for extra sessions in the evenings.”

My dad hired Ian as the tutor? Hadn’t I just put my foot down about that? “Well, I told him I didn’t need a tutor.”

“He told me that.”

I shook my head. “The thing is, I just had this really triumphant moment with my parents where I told them to stop running my life, and then I made a grand step toward—you know—being my own person and making my own choices from the inside out, and that extra gumption you saw in the gym today was me claiming my own long-lost power, so if I just give in now and let them take back over, I’m kind of surrendering after I’ve already won the battle.”

There was no way he’d followed that.

But he nodded. “I understand.”

“You do?”

“I absolutely think you should”—here, he slowed down to get the words right—“‘claim your own power.’”

He wasn’t going to fight me. “Thank you,” I said.

“Except,” he said then.

“Except what?”

“As good as it feels to win a battle, I want you to win the war.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means your parents are right.”

I gave him a look, like, Really? “That’s not exactly helpful.”

“You could benefit from extra help. There are all sorts of things we could do that are outside the range of typical PT.”

“Like?”