Tears filled her eyes.
“I am ashamed of that.”
I believed her.
She told me she had been in therapy. She told me the agency’s first profitable quarter without new family money had made her proud in a way the Greenwich house never had. She said she was learning to distinguish support from entitlement and love from ownership.
Then she apologized for the slap.
No explanation after it.
No request for the house.
No request for Whitmore.
No request for money.
I did not promise everything would return to normal.
“I love you,” I said. “Normal was part of the problem.”
She cried.
So did I.
We began again slowly.
She came to my seventy-second birthday two years after the one that ended with broken glasses. This time there were only eight people at dinner because I had discovered I preferred smaller tables.
Valerie arrived early carrying a plain bakery box.
Inside was a cake.
No seventy-two candles.
Instead, she had brought two.
“One for the year you turned seventy,” she said. “One for now.”
I stared at her.
“I thought maybe you should get to light the ones nobody lit.”
My throat closed.
We placed the two candles side by side.
Lucy’s photograph stood upright on the sideboard behind us.
Valerie did not sit at the head of the table. Neither did I.
There was no head.
After dinner, she asked if I wanted to make a wish.
“I already did,” I said.
“What was it?”
