“Mom?”
She looked back.
Ethan stood under the entrance light.
“What are you going to do with the quilt?”
June looked down at it.
“I don’t know.”
He hesitated.
“I want it.”
The answer came too quickly.
“No.”
His face changed.
“Why?”
“Because right now you want to undo something, not because you understand what it is.”
“That’s not true.”
“Maybe.”
She opened the car door.
“But it’s mine until I decide otherwise.”
Then she got in and drove home.
For the first ten minutes, she cried so hard she had to pull into a grocery-store parking lot.
Not because Claire hated the quilt.
Because Ethan had already planned to hide it.
That small fact hurt more than the public humiliation.
Claire had never been June’s child.
Ethan was.
June sat in the dark car with the quilt on the passenger seat.
She pressed both palms against the steering wheel until the shaking stopped.
Then she drove home.
—
June lived in a modest red-brick semi-detached house in Vanier.
She had bought it with her husband, Malcolm, when Ethan was four.
Malcolm had died eleven years earlier after a stroke.
For three months after his death, June left his boots beside the basement door because moving them felt too final.
Eventually she gave them to a shelter.
She kept one of his work shirts.
A small square of that shirt was sewn into the back corner of Ethan’s quilt.
June had not told him.
The house was dark when she entered.
She turned on the hallway lamp.
Removed her boots.
Placed the quilt across the back of the sofa.
