Story:

Peach's father folded the paper and came over too, laughing at her from above, giving her head an affectionate, disapproving pat.

"Hey, hey, now. You're a high school student. You can't cry like a baby after only three nights away from your parents—what will you do at university, drag your mother along in a suitcase?"

But his hand stayed on her hair, and his voice was thick at the edges, and he cleared his throat and blamed the evening news for his eyes.

Peach tried. She genuinely tried to stop crying—sniffling, laughing at herself, wiping her face, apologizing, then breaking down again the moment she caught her mother's eye. It was no use. The tears had ten years of arrears and no intention of settling out of court.

At last, surrendering, her mother took charge exactly the way mothers have taken charge since the beginning of the world: shooed her father back to his paper, took Peach by the hand to her own bedroom, and undressed her weeping teenage daughter like she was six years old again—

Washed her face, drew a proper hot bath with the good soap, washed her hair herself while Peach sat in the steam with red eyes and an empty, light, unburdened heart.

Then she dried her, brushed her hair out with slow strokes, dressed her in her softest home clothes, tucked her into her own bed under her own quilt in her own room, and sat beside her rubbing her back until the crying finally smoothed out into slow, exhausted breathing.

"Sleep, my Peach," her mother said softly, turning off the lamp. "You're home. Everything is all right now."

And Peach lay in the dark of her real, small, ordinary bedroom—awash with the smell of the shampoo her mother had used on her since primary school—and stared at the ceiling she had dreamed about for ten years, one thought circling over and over under her ribs where the ache and the joy were hopelessly tangled:

I'm home. I'm really home.