I find wood glue in the toolbox and start putting the birdhouse back together. Slowly. Carefully. Piece by piece. It’s tedious work, and I’m far from skilled, but I take my time. I hold each joint steady, resisting the urge to rush.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” I whisperas I press two splintered panels together. “Why do you build beautiful things and never let anyone know they came from you?”
The house creaks around me, silent.
I keep going. Some pieces are gone, lost to the wind or buried too deep in the mud. But I glue what I have, and when I’m done, it’s imperfect—visible damage, uneven edges—but still standing.
I run a finger over his carved initials.
“I wasn’t going to leave,” I say, the words breaking loose before I can brace myself. “I know that’s what you thought. That it was all just a PR stunt, that I was writing an ending before the beginning even finished. But I wasn’t planning my exit. Not anymore.”
Tears fall before I realize they’ve started—quiet, steady, uninvited. I let them come.
For Owen. For the house. For the version of myself who was always waiting for the next thing instead of letting herself belong.
I’ve spent so long bracing for abandonment that I forgot what it means to stay. To fight for something. To fight for someone.
Now I’m standing in the aftermath of both a storm and a silence, trying to rebuild with nothing but wood glue and borrowed resolve.
The birdhouse sits in front of me, scarred but standing. A mirror of this house. Of me. Ofus.
When the tears finally subside,I find myself reaching for my phone with surprising purpose. Not to check social media or document the renovation for followers, but to make a call I’ve avoided for weeks. My finger hovers over the contact for a moment before I press “call.”
My mother answers on the fourth ring, her voice carrying the distracted quality that characterized most of my childhoodconversations with her. “Penny? Is everything okay? You never call on Tuesdays.”
“I don’t have a designated calling day, Mom,” I say, though we both know that’s not entirely true. Our communication follows patterns—predictable check-ins that maintain connection without requiring vulnerability.
“Well, it’s nice to hear from you anyway,” she says, and I can hear movement in the background—the familiar sounds of her never being quite settled in one place. “How’s your little house project going? The pictures online look amazing.”
I hesitate, the practiced response—Great! Making progress every day!—hovering on my lips before I let it dissolve, replaced by unexpected honesty. “It’s falling apart, actually. The house is half-finished, the contractor quit, there’s a storm damaging what we’ve built, and the TV people are about to pull out.”
The silence that follows is so uncharacteristic of my perpetually chatty mother that I check to make sure the call hasn’t dropped.
“Mom?”
“I’m here,” she says, her voice softer now, the background noise suddenly absent as if she’s stopped moving to focus. “That sounds really hard, sweetheart.”
The simple acknowledgment, free of advice or redirection, breaks something open inside me. “It is hard. And I don’t know what to do. I’ve always been good at starting over when things get complicated, but I don’t want to start over this time. I want to fix what’s broken, but I don’t know how.”
“Is this about the house,” my mother asks gently, “or about the contractor?”
I laugh despite myself, the sound wet with lingering tears. “Both. Neither. I don’t know anymore. The lines have blurred.”
“Tell me about him,” she says, and for the first time in my adult life, I feel like my mother is actually listening rather than waiting for her turn to speak.
So I tell her about Owen—his precision andpatience, his hidden creativity, his loyalty to family and community. I tell her about the window seat debate and the beam removal and the dance during the power outage. I tell her about finding the flip plans and the devastating argument that followed. I tell her about realizing I love him precisely when he was walking away.
“And now I’m stuck in this half-finished house during a storm, trying to figure out if I should fight for this place—for him—or if I should do what I’ve always done and find somewhere new to start over,” I finish, surprised by my own candor.
My mother is quiet again, but it’s a thoughtful silence rather than a distracted one. When she finally speaks, her voice carries a wisdom I’ve rarely associated with my flighty, artistic parent.
“You know, Penny, I’ve moved seventeen times since you graduated high school,” she says. “New apartments, new towns, new states. Never stayed anywhere longer than eighteen months.”
“I know, Mom.” This is familiar territory—her restlessness, her inability to settle.
“What you don’t know is why,” she continues, surprising me. “I built a life on wheels because I didn’t believe anything would stay. Your father, my parents, even you kids eventually—everyone leaves or gets left. So I learned to leave first, to keep moving so nothing could root too deep.”
The parallel to my own pattern is so obvious it takes my breath away. “That sounds familiar,” I manage.
