I smiled when my son told me I wasn’t welcome for Christmas, got in my car, and drove home. Two days later, my phone showed eighteen missed calls. That’s when I knew something had gone terribly wrong.

The sentence landed like a punch to the chest.

I blinked.
“I’m sorry—what?”

He stared at the marble coffee table instead of my face. The same one I’d helped him choose when Isabella decided their old furniture looked “unsophisticated.”

“Isabella’s parents are coming,” he muttered. “And they’d… prefer if you weren’t here.”

My fingers went numb.