Time heals all wounds. When you have the power to rewind it, you begin to wonder whether it's too much responsibility for one person to hold.
*****
Sometimes, walking away is the sca...
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If there was something Iris missed about the normalcy of her regular, boring timeline, it was her mom.
Following the divorce, Iris' mom grew clingier, the phone calls increasing in frequency, but Iris hadn't minded. She knew she was the type of person to thrive in environments where she was needed (case in point: Lyra Sinclair) and had jumped at the opportunity to support her mom through the rough patch, especially considering her father's sudden radio silence.
He'd call twice a year—on her birthday and Christmas—still aloof and unapproachable, and Iris had convinced herself of two things: he didn't know her anymore and was no longer pretending to, and she would no longer try to make a home out of a temporary place. Her home was wherever her mom was—New York, Providence, wherever it might be. He didn't need her, but her mom did, and the divorce hadn't been Iris' fault.
So, to have one of the closest relationships in her life be torn away from her thanks to her own poor prioritizing and lack of proper planning hurt a lot more than it would have had she not been directly involved in it. Perhaps they'd find their way back to each other eventually, with the divorce still being in full swing regardless of Lyra's survival or not, regardless of how Iris' college experience would unfold or what her main focus would be.
In case Lyra survived all of this, now with Iris' divine intervention on repeat, in case the worst thing to come out of it would be a friendship cracked and shattered beyond repair with both parties alive and safe, Iris would still have her mom. She wouldn't have to lick her own wounds in the quiet loneliness of an apartment that meant nothing to her.
She would be okay. She would.
She would have to be. It was the only outcome she'd be content with.
Even with everything going on with Lyra, even with every waking moment of Iris' current life revolving around that one thing, that one person, there was somehow a side of her psyche that held on to an unsuspectingly mundane aspect of her previous life.
With Lyra going through great lengths to avoid both her and her parents, using the excuse that she didn't want to accidentally let slip anything about Iris' new found time rewinding powers (valid by itself, were she not using it as an attempt to avoid confronting an uncomfortable situation, the way she always did), it was ironic that Iris was doing the exact opposite by trying to feel close to her own mom at the same time.
Thanksgiving would be the perfect time to do so, especially when it would be just the two of them alone in that big house. The divorce, albeit not finalized or fully kickstarted—it was mostly empty threats, a cold war brewing between two opposing parties fighting for the right to be right they'd never accomplish and for Iris' support, and general passive-aggression—was already weighing down on the trio, and Iris' dad had decided to spend the holidays with his family.
