I approached, forcing a smile to my face.
“Good morning,” I called out cheerfully. “Everyone ready for paradise?”
Tyler and Emma glanced up at me but didn’t run over like they usually did. Tyler gave me a quick, tight smile. Emma clutched the handle of her suitcase.
Jessica turned toward me, her expression oddly flat.
Not excited. Not warm.
Cold.
“Margaret, there’s been a change of plans,” she said.
I stopped, my hand still wrapped around the suitcase handle, fingers suddenly numb.
“A change of plans?” I repeated. I heard my own voice from far away, like it was coming through a hospital intercom.
Jessica sighed as if I were already inconveniencing her.
“We gave your ticket to my mother,” she said, tilting her head toward Linda. “The kids love her more and she deserves a vacation. You understand, right?”
For a heartbeat, I thought I must have misheard her. Maybe it was the noise. Maybe it was the flight announcements echoing off the high ceiling. Maybe she’d said something about the rental car, the room type, anything else.
“You what?” I asked.
Jessica’s tone stayed casual, almost bored, like she was rearranging dinner reservations and not rewriting a forty-seven-thousand-dollar family trip I had planned down to the last snorkel fin.
“We changed your reservation,” she said. “Linda’s going instead. You can just go home.” She smiled like she was being reasonable, generous even. “The grandkids love her more. They’re closer to her. It makes sense for her to be the one on the beach with them.”
The sentence landed harder than any blunt force trauma I’d ever seen on a CT scan.
I turned to Kevin.
For thirty-eight years, I’ve watched emotion move across my son’s face the way I watched EKG waves march across monitors. Fear, joy, teenage arrogance, first-love stupidity, the quiet pride when he opened his Northwestern acceptance letter. I know every version of that face.
