It could have made me cry, how I was half in love with my boyfriend’s mom. How she fixed us after-school snacks I could have made myself but never would have thought of. Slivered apples with just-warm peanut butter, drizzled with honey. Salty crackers spread with butter and razor-thin curls of parmesan. How we’d linger at the kitchen table long after Aidan had moved on, the beedle-boop of his game drifting in from his room while his mom and I poured second cups of coffee. We’d laugh about the stupidest stuff, even though Aidan told me I had no sense of humor. “But most women don’t,” he said. Now I’d say something goofy just to see his mom smile. Her smile was like being lost in cold woods, then finding a campfire. Aidan had that smile. It was why I’d liked him when we met, trusted him so quickly. But he was like a third-generation copy of a movie you found on YouTube. He was the orange glow of the campfire, without the warmth.

Aidan’s mom and I talked about everything, and I loved how she made me feel I could do anything, apply for schools, fill out aid forms, sign up for food stamps, get housing vouchers. I was aging out of foster care that year. My eighteenth birthday loomed and I hated every day that got me closer to it.

My old foster mom had an exercise bike; she’d sit and pedal and I’d ask why she rode so fast but never got anywhere and she said she was trying to out-pedal the pounds. I wished I could get on that bike now and out-pedal the years.

“I wish you could be my mom,” I blurted out, then stopped, gulped coffee to keep myself from saying more. She just smiled and said she knew what I meant. That she’d always wanted a daughter too.

And for a minute I let myself believe I had a right to be here. Her smile warmed everything. Her round face, her brown eyes that made me think of coffee. Aidan had her eyes, but darker. Espresso with an extra kick. Shiny but sharp, like icicles hanging from a porch roof, making me want to shrink away even as he pulled me closer.

“Don’t be a prude,” he said to me, that time in his room.

“No, it’s weird, your parents will hear,” I said, and he laughed and turned up the music.

“You know you’re always welcome in this house,” Aidan’s mother told me now, and I knew I was. As a daughter-in-law, part of a matched set, like the kissing angel dolls she kept in a glass cabinet.

“We could add a bathroom downstairs,” Aidan’s mother said. “Make it a whole apartment.” And all I could think was how everything about her was exactly what I needed, and how everything about him was not.

Aidan slid-slouched into the kitchen, wiping his Takis-covered fingers on his joggers.

“What’d I miss?” he asked.