Chapter 10

They style the stage in San Francisco like a living room: woven rug, performatively cozy seating, lamps that trap us in a softly glowing circle. My mother sits next to me holding a mug of Saint-branded magnesium tea. I’ve sunk so deeply into this couch that I’m practically peering at the audience over my knees.

A stack of Letters to My Someday Daughter hardcovers sits on the coffee table between us and the moderator, their jackets proudly sporting a photo from my fourth birthday. In it, my cheeks are lit by birthday candles and I’m leaning face-first over a chocolate cake. Camilla smiles in the corner of the shot, her face looming larger than mine. I spend the first ten minutes of the show staring at my younger self, frozen there at four years old.

“The question isn’t, How much kindness do I deserve?” Camilla is saying. “It’s, Where did I get the idea that kindness should be meted out?” She looks at the moderator, lets her words land. “There is no bank. It’s not a debit system.” When her hand drifts over to me, brushing my kneecap, I fight the urge to flinch. “And when we upend our thought patterns—imagine that, instead of speaking to ourselves, we’re speaking to someone we love like a daughter—kindness feels like a different type of currency entirely. It doesn’t feel like a currency at all.” She looks at me, and I force myself to smile. We started the entire evening with a slideshow of our relationship, a tense twenty minutes of questions about our mother-daughter bond that made me feel like I was gaslighting myself. Of course it’s empowering to have such a strong woman as my role model. Of course I’m grateful to have a mother who teaches me self-care.

“There is no kindness you wouldn’t extend to your child,” Camilla says. “There should be no kindness you won’t extend to yourself.”

Applause. I think of Liam from the doctor’s office, his little bicep thrust toward me in the waiting room. Of the calm I felt standing in Dr. Osman’s supply closet, surrounded by boxes of nitrile gloves and hypodermic needles. How all that made perfect sense, and how Camilla sounds like she’s speaking in tongues.

“That’s so interesting,” the moderator says. She’s a psychology student at UCSF and won some contest to be here, doing this. She’s misty-eyed at her prize, responding to everything Camilla says with the kind of awe usually reserved for marriage proposals and the northern lights. “We do think of it that way, don’t we? Like we’ll be sacrificing something else—going into some kind of red—if we go too easy on ourselves.”

My mother nods deeply. “It’s such a hard thing, to go easy. There’s a reason every Inner Saint retreat begins with what we call The Great Unclenching.” She spreads her fingers in front of her and demonstrates drawing a deep breath. She speaks again on the exhale: “An entire day dedicated to letting go. Going easy.”

I have no idea what to look at. Magnolia told me during the insufferable hour we spent preparing for this that I couldn’t look at my hands, that I couldn’t make eye contact with the audience, that I couldn’t stare off into space. But I absolutely can’t look at Camilla while she embarrasses us both like this. So as the moderator prattles on, my eyes rove across the stage—to the giant poster-board sign with both our faces on it, to the intricate water carafe set on a glass table for no discernible reason, to the X taped to the floor for the book signing line that’ll drain what little remains of my sanity.

And, in the shadowy folds of the stage curtains, to Magnolia—holding a clipboard and watching me like a hawk. I can just see Silas behind her, video camera propped on a tripod in front of him. He’s studying its little screen, half his face obscured, but when he catches me watching him, his lips split crookedly into a smile.

“And with that, we’ll take some questions from the audience.”

The house lights go up, and I blink into the sudden sea of faces staring back at us. Women, almost entirely, holding their copies of Letters and far too many crumpled tissues. Who’s crying? Why is anybody crying?

“In the blue dress,” I hear my mother say, and register that she’s stood up next to me, that she’s holding a microphone. “With the baby.”

A woman in the front row points to herself, eyebrows raised. She’s holding what looks like a newborn, half her chest covered in a duck-patterned blanket.

“Yes,” Camilla says. “You, mama.”

My mind goes full Pinterest board: Mama bear. Mama bird. You got this, mama.

“Hi,” the woman says. She stands slowly, like she’s trying not to alert her baby to the fact that they’re on the move. “I mean, thank you, first. Thank you for being here.”

My mother reaches down to rest her hand on my shoulder, and I sit up taller. It’s showtime, apparently.

“This is my someday daughter,” the woman says, turning a little so we can see the side of her baby’s face. “And she’s already changed everything for me, you know.”

“I do,” Camilla says, and my whole body clenches. Maybe I could use a quick Great Unclenching myself, whatever the hell that means.

The woman continues: “I might be a little different from the other gals here, because I didn’t read your book for the first time until a couple years ago. When I saw the Sex Summit story.”

I’m not sure if a hush actually falls over the audience or if my entire brain just fuzzes out. But the world goes quiet—like I’m trapped inside a cotton ball, like I’m immobilized and mute. Camilla’s hand doesn’t move from my shoulder.

“That story just—well, it moved me,” the woman says. “Seeing that bond between you and Audrey; your openness and intimacy. It’s what I want to create with my daughter. And I was hoping you might be able to tell us more about that weekend and what it meant for you—especially for you, Audrey.”

Silence. The woman and I stare at each other. My throat feels like it’s stuffed with pipe cleaners, somehow both furry and sharp.

“What it meant for me,” I repeat. All five of my mother’s fingertips press into my shoulder. I glance at Magnolia, whose eyes are wide and afraid. No one here—not a single person in this entire auditorium—can ever know what that weekend meant for me.