1

Only a certain kind of mother would abandon her child. And that appears to be what my sister Bea is doing right now. Abandoning her daughter, Piper. And leaving her with me. But that can’t be true.

“Piper? See anything? Anyone?”

My niece peeks out from behind the gauzy curtain that protects the front window of my brownstone.

“Nope. Not yet.” She tucks herself back into the folds of soft linen. “Do you think she’ll be here soon?”

Piper’s been concentrating on the street below, two stories down, for almost an hour now, scouting for her mother’s car. In today’s determined last light of early August, when afternoon lingers while evening waits in the wings, my sister was supposed to pick up her daughter. But Bea, for whom an appointment is often merely a suggestion, has not shown up.

“Of course she’ll be here, honey. But Pipe?”

“Yeah?” From behind the curtain.

“Let’s play Endings.” It’s a logical and not-scary proposition from me, we play this game all the time. Piper knows I’m all about endings. As a book agent, I’m always looking for a better one. Now I’m hoping she’ll think her Aunt Eliza is yet again trying to show her how analytical thinking is fun. In truth, I’m seriously wondering why Piper’s mother has not arrived to reclaim her. This has never happened before. “What’s the happiest ending you can imagine?”

“Pizza!” I’m relieved to see she’s smiling as she turns to me, engaged. “That’s always a happy ending.”

Pizza. Only an eleven-year-old could come up with that answer, and I’m pleased that Piper is distracted. Her weeks with me have been an intermittent ritual since Piper’s first birthday with us. A very special week with Auntie Eliza, Bea had explained to her daughter. And, she went on, with her italicized country-club enthusiasm, that meant she and I would both have mom’s weekends, hers for real and mine pretend. And wasn’t that fabulous?

Like I would believe she was selflessly offering a moment of sisterhood.

We bicker, sometimes, sisters do, and we disagree, but Bea and I have always been a team, ever since the crash, ever since everything, and since the universe had gut-punched us both, I do anything to make her happy. And I do love my feisty little Piper. I didn’t mind pretending to be a mom. For a week or so.

And our times together are full of adventures, both real and on the page. I want Piper to exercise her imagination, to see past the end of the written story. Over the years, we’ve played Endings to concoct new final chapters for Max and his Wild Things, and Pooh. Once we created an even happier ending for Cinderella, one that included a pony, a best friend, and endless access to magical candy bars. If LexLit Literary Agency had received the manuscript as a middle-grade submission, we would have sent our form rejection letter. To Piper and me, though, our version was perfect.

But I wonder what ending Piper is imagining now. Transition has been tough for her since her parents’ divorce, as if she’s constantly skittish of the next unhappy surprise. I try to keep her fears in balance—the Ramseys have experienced enough disaster.

“You are so right, pizza is always a terrific ending,” I say now. But Piper’s back at the window, glued. Maybe my anxiety is contagious.

We scan the empty street below, sending our hopes into the waning afternoon, willing a person to appear. The amber flames of the faux gaslights struggle to be seen against the persistent day, but we do not need extra illumination to see that Bea’s car has not arrived. How will this scene in her life play out?

Many years ago, with me curled up on Mom’s lap, I became obsessed with endings. “That can’t be all.” I can still feel the pout on my face as I would point to that night’s book. “What happens after that?” I was always enchanted by the newest once-upon-a-time, but frustrated when Mom said she’d finished reading the story. “And what happens after that?”

“Silly goose, Eliza, you know what happens.” Mom always answered the same way. “They lived happily ever after.”

“Ever ever ever after?” I’d persist. “And I’m not silly. If the book has no more pages, how do you really know what happened next?”

Problem was, Mom saw stories as boundaried by the covers of the book. I never did. Still don’t. Stories continue to unspool, like real life, it’s just that authors don’t have enough pages to tell us the rest. But I can always imagine it. Always.

I do understand, after all that happened, we can never know the endings of our own stories. But the stories of others … that’s different. From the moment I decided that Beth March lived and all the Little Women celebrated their father’s return from the war, there’s always been another chapter for me. The happier ending. Even though I can’t imagine such a thing for myself. Not with all I’ve lost.

“Maybe Mom thought she was supposed to come tomorrow?” Piper’s eyes are clouded with disquiet. She’s rolled up the sleeves of her bright purple Stick the Landing T-shirt, and white shorts over tanned legs and bright white trainers telegraph her place in her world. Her mother has become a hotshot social media fashion influencer, just ask her, but thank goodness she’s failed to fully influence her daughter.

“I texted her.” She holds up the phone that’s constantly in her hand. “But she didn’t answer.”

“I texted her, too.” I make my voice carefully casual. “She didn’t answer me, either. Do you know where she went? Did she go out of town this week?” Why Bea doesn’t tell me specifics, I’ll never understand—what if there was an emergency with Piper? But she’d dismissed all my concerns, reminding me that I was a fully formed human and supremely capable, and informing me that I have no idea what it’s like to be a mother, and all about her need for privacy and alone time. I suppose it’s left over from the days I was her nudgy younger sister. I’m three years younger, as I remind her when I need to needle her about something.

“Should we try to contact your dad?”

At that, Piper’s eyes narrow, and I picture a thousand horribles parading through her mind. “He doesn’t know where she is,” she says. “Or even me.”

I loathed Kyle from moment one, though apparently it took a besotted Bea years to realize the level of his jerkdom. Possessive, controlling. Ten years older. The recent divorce was a surprise to me, but who knows. It’s ungracious to be happy about someone else’s emotional upheaval, so for Piper’s sake as well as Bea’s, I am Switzerland, carefully neutral, and we don’t often discuss the absent Kyle. “Your father still loves you,” I assure her.

“Right.” Piper says it without looking at me. “I need to get my book.”

She moves away from me, padding down the hall toward the guest room. Kyle left them, what felt like suddenly to me, earlier this summer. Bea, eyes red-rimmed and narrative determined, had told me she’d explained to Piper that she and Kyle were “trying to work things out.” Now Piper must feel like her mother has vanished, too.

I understand that black hole of loss, understand it profoundly.

Both my parents vanished from my life, eleven years ago. Only Bea and I survived the plane crash.

Some mornings, after it all, even after the hospital, I’d still expect to hear Mom singing some silly song to wake me up, or smell the fragrance of Dad’s famous pancakes, and then I’d open my eyes and the song and the breakfast would disappear. I’d smell aviation fuel, instead, impossibly, fleet as a memory. That smell still makes me sick.

After the crash, Mom’s younger sister, Margaret, also a lawyer, and a flying enthusiast like our dad, had semi-moved in with Bea and me, scheduling us between trips to her beloved historic sites and hiking trails.

Aunt Margaret took on the role of part-time parent to two suddenly-adults, who in a flash had turned from happy and privileged teenagers into grieving orphans, a word Bea and I tried out in the midst of our darkest torments. We were orphans, as bleak and forlorn as in Dickens, we decided. We only had each other.

When I went off to grad school and Bea got married, Aunt Margaret bowed out of our lives, and another Ramsey family era ended. Bea had confided to me what a gift Margaret’s departure had been to her and Kyle, her smarmy and too-old-for-her new boyfriend. Now Kyle and I can do whatever we want, she’d said. Today, as my own niece frets, it’s my turn to be the protective aunt.

Every happy family leaves in its own way, I badly quote to myself. The fear of abandonment has ruined a series of relationships for me. I’d have a good time with perfectly nice, motivated guys who cared about me, and were sensitive, smart, funny, thoughtful, all the desirable things. But I’d worry—what if they left me? So I’d leave first. I had the controls.

None of that is Piper’s fault, and barely in Piper’s lifetime, and I will not allow Piper to be another victim in our family’s continuing drama.

Because Bea would never abandon her daughter. Everything will be fine.

2

A fuzzy buzz squawks through my apartment’s black-box intercom, the device a relic from the fifties. My heart leaps, the world resettles, the sun comes out.

Bea. Finally. I’m going to kill her for being late. She should have called. She should have texted. Her daughter was worried and distressed. Who would do that to a kid?

“Vitucci’s,” the scratchy voice says.

The sun disappears behind the clouds again.

“It’s the pizza.” My laptop is open on the dining room table. While we waited for the pizza—and Bea—I’d been trying to catch up with the manuscripts I’m supposed to read.

“I’ll go.” Piper hops up from the cozy chair where she was reading a book with a dragon girl on the cover, a wild fantasy of flying and flames. Thinking of stories reminds my nagging conscience of how behind I am on my work. Though I did have the last week off—as “off” as someone who reads for a living can be, which is never—I’m supposed to return to my office in LexLit’s Beacon Hill brownstone starting tomorrow afternoon. It’s a command performance, as is everything with Whitney. She commands; I perform. Or else I lose my job.

Tomorrow, Whitney Hart, founder of LexLit Literary Agency and she who must be obeyed, is expecting me to show her the manuscript submissions I think have a chance at publication. “Your livelihood as an agent depends on picking precisely the right book to pitch to precisely the right editors,” she tells me. “This is no time to be nice. Only smart.”

Romance novels are my specialty, because they all have such reliably happy endings. Whitney takes the crime, true and fictional. As well as anything else she wants, in whatever realm. Her clients’ books end with justice, which is happiness only for some.

We move to the kitchen, pull up wicker stools to the center island, open the pizza box. The fragrance of oregano and tomato wafts into the room.

“How come you don’t like my dad?” Piper doesn’t look at me as she eases out a cheesy triangle. A strand of melted mozzarella attenuates between the box and the plate, and Piper captures it with her finger, twirling it into submission. Then puts the slice on a plate for me.

“What makes you ask about your dad?” I say, accepting the pizza. “Did he call you? Text you?” My heart twists at this thought. Maybe Kyle is looking for Bea, too, which is either great or awful.

“Nope. I was kind of thinking about things.”

“Things,” I say, folding my piece in half. “Any thing in particular? Did you text him, about your mom? The time is so different there, remember.”

Kyle. Always so dismissive of me. Jealous, I theorized, that Bea spent some of her attention on me instead of him. I could think of a lot of endings for him, but I don’t want to waste the time.

“It’s tomorrow in Japan already,” she says. “So does that mean Dad already knows what happened?”

Moments like this, I know we are connected. I love Piper’s brain. “I always think that, too. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

She purses her lips. “Maybe,” she finally says. “But, what if Mom doesn’t come?”

“Silly goose. I bet your mom will be here any minute.” I tap another text to Bea, a long line of question marks she can make into anything she wants. Where the hell are you, is what they mean. What’s going on. I’m worried.

“Tomorrow is Remembrance Day, right?” Piper’s eyes soften. “August eighth? She would never miss that.”

“You are so right,” I say. “She would never miss Remembrance Day.”

And that is the capstone to my fear. There are elements of our lives that are immutable. And tomorrow, Remembrance Day, is one of them.

Now the clock is ticking. If Bea does not arrive tonight, something is horribly wrong.

Copyright © 2026 by Hank Phillippi Ryan