Her father reached automatically to fix it, then stopped.
Lucy adjusted it herself.
At lunch they carried the cake to the table together. There were no assigned seats. No one saved the grandmother’s chair for a guest. Amelia hovered beside it for a second, uncertain.
Lucy noticed.
“You can sit there,” she said.
Amelia looked at her. “Are you sure?”
Lucy considered the question carefully.
Then she nodded.
It was not surrender this time.
That was the difference.
Her father placed three plates on the table and set a real fork beside each one. When he lit the candles, Lucy looked at the framed card on the shelf across the room.
A year earlier, she had used that card to ask whether there was room for her in somebody else’s family.
Now she knew the better question was whether the people around her made room without requiring her to disappear.
She closed her eyes, made a wish she did not need to tell anyone, and leaned toward the candles.
Amelia leaned too, waiting.
Lucy opened one eye.
“Together?” she asked.
“Together.”
They blew out the flames in one breath, and this time no one in the room had to earn a place at the table.
