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And that was okay. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I turned on the TV, flipped through channels, found a documentary about wolves in Yellowstone, watched it all the way through.
Then another about deep-sea creatures. I fell asleep sometime after midnight with the TV still on, the narrator’s calm voice describing bioluminescent jellyfish. In the morning, my phone had 32 new messages.
The kids are worried. The kids. Ava and Mason.
Who barely knew me. Who saw me once a year, if that. Who called me Grandma Dorothy like I was a distant relative.
Not the woman who’d held their mother for nine months before she was born. I texted back one word. Safe.
Then I got dressed, went downstairs, and ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, coffee. That was better than I expected.
At the table next to me, a family of four was arguing about their itinerary. Disneyland versus the beach. The mother looked exhausted.
The father was scrolling his phone. The kids were kicking each other under the table. I felt suddenly, overwhelmingly grateful I was alone.
After breakfast, I walked. The hotel was near Century Boulevard—not a walking neighborhood—but I didn’t care. I walked past car rental places, past a Target, past a strip mall with a nail salon and a faux restaurant.
I stopped at a small park—really just a patch of grass with a few benches and a playground. I sat down and watched a young mother push her toddler on a swing. The child’s laughter was pure.
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