She swallowed.
“Dad came in.”
The word hung between us.
“I didn’t know he was coming,” she said. “I hadn’t seen him for so long. I thought if I moved, he might go away. So I stayed behind the big chair.”
My chest tightened.
“They didn’t see you?”
“No. They talked. Then Dad left through the kitchen door. Grandma came back. I didn’t know the tablet caught it until later.”
“Did you speak to him?”
She shook her head.
“I wanted to. But he was talking about us like we weren’t real.”
I pulled her close. She pressed her forehead against my shoulder.
For three years, I had tried to answer her questions about Daniel without poisoning her against him. He had left when she was five. His calls became infrequent, then stopped. Small amounts of support arrived irregularly. I had told her he made choices I didn’t understand, but that those choices were not caused by her.
Now I had to face the possibility that while I was explaining his absence as distance, he had been visiting my sister just a few miles away.
“How did you put the video on the silver drive?” I asked.
“We learned how to save school projects on a flash drive. You let me use your old laptop for homework. I copied it. I didn’t delete it from my tablet.”
That detail mattered. I wanted to know the recording still existed somewhere safe.
“Why didn’t you show me when you found it?”
Her mouth trembled.
“Because you always get sad when somebody talks about Dad. And you were so tired from work. And Grandma said weddings are important and we’re not supposed to upset Vanessa.”
I shut my eyes.
In my determination to keep our little life steady, I’d made sadness seem like something Lily needed to protect me from.
“Oh, sweetheart. It is my job to take care of you. You never have to protect me from the truth.”
She began to cry.
“I thought if I told you, you’d have to be sad again.”
I held her until the sobs eased.
“Sad is something I can handle,” I said. “You should have been able to come to me.”
She looked up.
“Was I bad to play it in front of everybody?”
I chose my answer carefully.
“That was a very big thing for a child to decide alone. I wish you hadn’t had to. But the lies in that video aren’t your fault, and you didn’t make the adults tell them. Next time, you bring anything frightening straight to me, even if you think it will hurt.”
