Her daughter, p.1
Her Daughter, page 1
Her
Daughter
A Novel
Fran Hawthorne
©2026 by Fran Hawthorne
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.
The author grants the final approval for this literary material.
First Digital Version
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-68513-699-4
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2025942943
PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING
www.blackrosewriting.com
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For every Alice and Esme
Praise for
Her Daughter
"About parenthood, love, the mystery of estrangement and hope of reconciliation, this novel is a stunner."
–Caroline Leavitt, New York Times best-selling author of Pictures of You and Days of Wonder
"In the wake of an acrimonious divorce, Alice becomes estranged from her daughter, Esme, and grows increasingly desperate to reconnect, risking her career and friendships... Part mystery, part family drama, Her Daughter is a poignant, page-turning, emotional read."
–Jennifer Rosner, National Jewish Book Award finalist and author of The Yellow Bird Sings and Once We Were Home
"To read Her Daughter is to explore the relentless pain and self-doubt of a mother's estrangement from her only child, especially as the father's vengeful lies keep blocking every pathway to connection. In her poignant, honest depiction of what it takes to persevere, Fran Hawthorne takes us deep into the beauty and strength of human attachment."
–Mary Ann McGuigan, National Book Award finalist (1997) and author of That Very Place
“A true page-turner! I was captivated by the richly drawn characters and gripping story, and I'm looking forward to reading much more from Fran Hawthorne.”
–David Heska Wanbli Weiden, award-winning author of
Winter Counts and Wisdom Corner
"In this beautifully crafted family drama, unspooled in parallel timelines, a mother strives for answers, questions herself, and aches for a crumb of communication with her long-estranged daughter. Your compassion for both women will soar as you read this relatable and realistic story."
–S.M. Stevens, author of Beautiful & Terrible Things and winner of Indies Today's Best Literary Book of 2024
"Alice, a single mom, hasn’t heard from her daughter, Esme, in years. But when she learns that Esme has been arrested, Alice begins a desperate journey to find her. Ultimately, Alice's realization of who she is and how she has related to the people around her will go straight to the reader’s heart."
–Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Safe Colors: A Novel and winner of the Asian American Writers' Workshop members' choice award
"Her Daughter takes us through Alice and Esme’s complicated relationship, from Alice’s longing for a child, through the unpredictable cruelty of a vengeful ex-husband, and into the mysterious, agonizing period of alienation between mother and daughter. With candor and compassion, Hawthorne highlights the heartbreaking reality of parent-child estrangement, a phenomenon which has grown to epidemic proportions in our time."
–Julie Castillo, author of The Long Man’s Pillow
Chapter One
The email came from Dan’s professional account:
I’m only telling you in case the police contact you. Esme was arrested, but I’m handling everything, and she doesn’t want to hear from you.
Alice’s fingers couldn’t move properly. They hit the wrong keys on her phone, the 7 instead of the 8, the pound sign, the 9; then the stupid phone fell on the tile floor. Finally, she managed the ten digits for Dan’s veterinary office. But all she got was his recording. “The Wilson Animal Clinic is closed on Mondays. If your animal needs immediate medical care, please call the Animal Hospital of San Fernando Valley.”
On Dan’s home line in Calabasas, the phone rang and rang, just like when Alice had tried to talk to Esme six years ago.
Chapter Two
It wasn’t true. Her daughter couldn’t have been arrested. For what?
Was Esme in a jail somewhere, that very minute? Terrified, shivering, in a bare cement cell with a hard bunk and a stinking, lidless, steel toilet in the corner, clutching her royal blue sorority T-shirt for a blanket?
“That fucking volcano in Iceland erupted again!” someone said sharply in the hallway outside Alice’s office.
“Crap. We’ve been cutting our positions in the airlines, haven’t we?” another male voice replied.
“Not enough.”
The footsteps in the hallway were moving fast, and Alice shut her office door.
It wasn’t true. Dan was playing mind-games with her, the same way he’d been doing in the nineteen years since their divorce. Since before their divorce. Esme wasn’t the kind of person to commit a crime and be arrested.
Yeah, and how would Alice know what kind of person her own daughter was or wasn’t, since Esme hadn’t lived with her for nine years, hadn’t spoken a word to her in six, and the sole clue Google had ever revealed was the picture of Esme with her sorority sisters at UC Santa Barbara, cleaning litter from El Capitan?
Dan’s email was still blinking on Alice’s computer monitor. What could a mother do, sitting in a financial advisory office a mile from Santa Monica Beach?
She could call Roz. Roz might see something Alice was missing. She’d been there for Alice when Alice first started thinking about having a baby, and when Esme needed a sleepover while Alice went to check the forests in Humboldt County, and when Esme had her ballet recital. When Dan went crazy. When Esme ran away to live with Dan. But Roz didn’t answer her phone.
Okay, then—even better—Alice could call the police! Surely the police would tell a woman why her own daughter had been arrested. A traffic accident? A protest march that turned violent? Was she in jail? Which police? In Santa Barbara, the city where the detective had found an address for Esme last year? Or Calabasas, near Dan’s big house in the hills? For that matter, the arrest might not have happened in California at all. Esme was almost twenty-four years old. Now that she was no longer a student reliably enrolled at Santa Barbara, and still opaque on Google and Facebook, she could be anything, anywhere.
Alice dialed.
“SantaBarbaraPoliceDepartmentCanyouhold?” a woman’s voice answered, and then the line went silent.
Outside Alice’s window, the sky was pale blue with cheerful clumps of white clouds.
The Esme that Alice knew was the one displayed all around her, in her sunny little office. The framed photo on her wooden desk showing seven-year-old Esme in the pink fairy costume from her ballet recital; one of the photos teenage Esme had dumped in the garbage. The uneven, grayish-brown bowl that six-year-old Esme had made in her pottery class, painted with delicate orange and white flowers. This bowl is for your pencils at work, Mommy. Four No. 2 pencils were propped inside it.
According to her computer clock, Alice had been on hold for more than a minute.
Calling the police was a ridiculous idea. The only way to get their attention was to show up in person. It might take two hours to reach downtown Santa Barbara even if Alice left her office in the next ten or fifteen minutes, well before rush hour. She would simply tell Fred that she needed to go…somewhere. With luck, he’d be too absorbed in the Iceland volcano’s impact on air travel to notice.
In his corner office, Fred was wearing his wide red tie with a pattern of clowns tumbling downhill, rolling a pencil back and forth on his black desktop with a thin, manicured hand while he muttered to his computer screen.
“I have to go out for a while,” Alice said from the doorway.
“No, you don’t,” Fred replied promptly, without moving his head.
“It’s a family emergency.”
“The Cordwainer officials will be here in three days.”
“I’m sorry.”
Fred’s snappy voice grew louder and more staccato. “You can’t be ‘sorry.’ It’s a three hundred fucking million-dollar foundation, and they’re coming to speak with you, specifically. You’re the environmental guru of this firm. You’re the expert who can explain when companies are doing legitimate environmental goody-goody shit and when it’s greenwashing, and why your green portfolio is better than Bank of California’s or any other money manager’s.”
“I’ll finish the analysis tonight, after I get home. I promise.”
“You know the world is just now pulling its asses out of the worst financial collapse since the Thirties? You know the stock market has barely halfway recovered?” Fred flipped his pencil high toward the track lights above him. “I doubt that carbon-neutral is at the top of these Cordwainer folks’ agenda. We can’t piss them off.”
“I know. I’ll get it done.” Even if Alice had to write the whole analysis by hand, sitting in the police waiting room.
The pencil landed smack in the center of Fred’s outstretched palm. “You sure will.”
In Fred’s vocabulary, that could be t ranslated as authorization for Alice to leave.
It was hard to run in her Stuart Weitzman kitten heels, down the two flights of stairs from the Seshat Financial Advisors offices to the parking lot. Her left ankle wobbled. She grabbed the iron railing along the staircase, and her shoulder bag kept banging against her side, and the hair in the bun at her neck was shaking loose like Esme’s wild hair in her French braids, and the Prius’s damn door was stuck. When she finally got started, the traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard inched fitfully past the dusty sandwich shop, past the insurance office that was never open. It would take four hours to reach Santa Barbara at this rate, not two, with Esme maybe sitting in a bare cell while a guard yelled . . .
A little before the next red light, Alice pulled over to try Roz again. Voice mail. But a second later, Roz called back. “Oh, sweetie, I don’t believe it.” Her husky voice.
“I don’t know what to think.”
“What could she possibly be arrested for?”
“I don’t know!”
“Do you suppose Dan bailed her out? Can you ask him?”
“Ask Dan anything? Are you crazy?”
A short noise came from Roz’s end, as if she’d been about to say something else. “No, of course you can’t. Where are you now?”
“Driving to the Santa Barbara police station. Trying to.”
“I’ll be done with my last client at five. I can meet you then.”
“Oh thank you, Roz, but you don’t have to. That would be such a hassle for you.”
“I probably should tell you,” Roz said slowly. “I got a call from her. About six months ago.”
A thick, steady thrum of cars moved onward in the lanes next to Alice, blue sedans, gray SUVs, white hatchbacks, hybrids, gas-guzzlers, a line of colorful ants, all on their determined route to somewhere. A breath froze in her windpipe. “Esme called you?”
“Yes. Just—”
“And you never told me? What did she say?”
“She wasn’t—It was mainly about Jenny. A question about Jenny.”
About Jenny? Why would Esme be so interested in news about Roz’s daughter? It was years since the two girls had made jewelry and pottery together, the flowered bowl for Alice’s pencils, the chains of big fat beads for both mommies. They went on to different high schools, different colleges. “What did she ask about Jenny?”
“We only spoke for a few minutes.”
“How many?” Why were Alice’s fingers continuing to clutch the steering wheel as if she was still driving, pushing her way into the line of traffic? Alice let go and shifted her butt on the hard polyester seat.
“I don’t know. A few.”
“Five minutes?”
“Maybe. Four. Six. I don’t know.”
“Was she congratulating…?” But Jenny wouldn’t have been pregnant yet, when Esme called Roz.
“No, no,” Roz mumbled. “Nothing like that.”
“What was it? What—what did she say?”
“Well, first there was the usual polite, hello kind of thing. ‘How are you and Walt and everybody?’ Then…” The silence from Roz’s end was long enough for the inhaling and exhaling of a normal breath. “She asked how long it took Jenny to get fully back to normal after the drugs and the anorexia in high school. If she had any, you know, permanent damage. Like kidney damage or stomach damage.”
Alice’s stomach was kicking her. The way Esme had kicked when Alice was pregnant. “Esme was on drugs?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“But she asked you about drugs.”
“Yes and no.”
“That’s why she was arrested, for being on drugs! Or selling drugs.”
“Maybe not, sweetie.” Roz’s voice was calm and steady, probably the way she spoke with her most hysterical clients. “The topics people seem to be talking about aren’t always what they actually want to talk about. That’s one of the basics we learn as social workers.”
“Did she—did she say—did she mention specific drugs?”
“No.”
“Did you get her phone number?”
“She wouldn’t give it to me. And I forgot to do that star-six thing. I’m sorry.”
“What else did she say to you? Where was she living? What was she doing? Did she have a job?” There were too many questions, too much missing information that Alice should have known about her own daughter.
“She didn’t really say anything else.”
“Nothing?”
“She just—She just asked me not to tell you that she called.”
The May sunshine bored through the windshield. Alice pressed the phone tight against her cheekbone.
“That’s why I didn’t tell you about the conversation before today,” Roz rushed on, no longer so calm and steady. “I was trying to keep the channel open with her, because I was afraid she’d cut me off. If she’s still as stubborn as she used to be. Remember when she decided to copy Jenny, and she wouldn’t eat any food unless it was orange?”
For months and months, when Esme was four years old, those meals that had consisted entirely of carrots, orange juice, and Kraft macaroni and cheese. Tricolor pasta, but only the orange noodles. Tortilla chips. Even her shampoo had to be orange-color, and Roz miraculously found a brand made from apricots.
“Look,” Roz said, “if it was simply about drugs, she could have called any addiction clinic to ask those sorts of questions. She deliberately contacted me.”
“Because of Jenny.”
“Yes, but why would she go out of her way to phone her mother’s best friend, to ask about the friend’s daughter? You see?”
“See what? That Esme was worried about drugs? That she still hated me and wouldn’t dream of calling me or emailing me directly?”
“No!” For that single word, Roz’s voice jumped almost to a shout. “Subconsciously, I think she might have been reaching out to me as a substitute for contacting you. So I thought she would call again in a few weeks. And then eventually I’d ask her if I could tell you about our conversations. And that could be an opening.”
Roz and her rose-colored glasses as red as her hair, always the social worker with her faith in God, even in college, trying to find the happiest possible explanation for bad news. Esme wasn’t on drugs. Esme had actually wanted to talk to Alice. Roz meant well, but she was wrong. The likeliest explanation was the most straightforward. Esme had asked about Jenny’s drug use because she herself was seriously on drugs, and she didn’t want to speak to her own mother.
“I have to go, Roz. Before I get stuck in rush-hour traffic.”
“Call me later?”
“Sure. Thank you.”
“I’ll pray for you, sweetie.”
“Okay.”
Sweat was trickling into the neck of Alice’s silk blouse, and a mistyped text beeped from Fred: “Alterntvs to solar & wind?” “K,” she typed back. “Light green ok” he immediately added. Solar energy. Carbon emissions. Drugs. Jenny. Santa Barbara police. “Yes,” she typed. A gap opened up in the traffic stream one lane over, as the cars slowed for a red light at the corner, which was the only good luck so far in sight.
Chapter Three
“Please move away from the window, ma’am,” said the woman in the short-sleeved, navy-blue shirt on the other side of the bullet-proof glass. Her voice was curt, and her hair was blonde and straight, cut barely below her ears.
“Sorry.” Alice released her elbows off the smooth countertop in front of the window.
Her blazer was too heavy for this warm, crowded lobby. Her butt hurt from three hours on a car seat. Her throat screamed with dryness. But to the blonde policewoman behind the bullet-proof glass, her appearance needed to declare: I’m not a common criminal like other people who come in here. I wear designer shoes and a blazer. I help university endowments and nonprofit institutions and pension funds like yours in the police department invest billions of dollars in environmentally conscious companies every year!
“Esme Wilson,” Alice repeated, a little louder, from her new spot further away from the policewoman.
The woman typed on her computer keyboard. “No one of that name is in custody at this time,” she said without glancing up.
