She studied the drawing. “Why am I holding Bunny?”
I looked at the little rabbit in her arm.
Claire had bought Bunny when she was pregnant. I remembered now. She had placed him on the nursery shelf and told me she wanted Emma to have something soft waiting for her.
The rabbit had not merely hidden the truth about Claire’s death.
He had carried a truth Claire wanted her daughter to have long before danger ever entered our lives.
“She drew you because she was waiting for you,” I said. “She loved you before she could see you. Before she could hold you. Before you could say a single word.”
Emma’s eyes filled with tears, but she did not look afraid.
“She knew me?”
“She knew you were coming. And she was so happy.”
Emma leaned against me. I wrapped my arms around her, careful not to crush Bunny between us.
For a while, neither of us spoke.
The cookies burned a little because we forgot about them.
We ate them anyway.
That evening, the sun came through the living-room windows in long amber bars. Mark arrived with a paper bag of strawberries and stopped at the doorway, waiting as he always did.
Emma ran to him.
Not halfway.
All the way.
“Uncle Mark,” she said, throwing her arms around his legs, “we made Mommy cookies.”
Mark closed his eyes and held her gently.
“Did you save me one?”
Emma considered this with theatrical seriousness.
“Maybe.”
I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched them. The house was not the house it had been. Some rooms had been repainted. The laundry-room door had been replaced. The locks were new. The security system had been rebuilt by people Detective Ramirez vetted personally.
But the real change was not in the walls.
It was in the sound of Emma laughing in a room where she had once been afraid to speak.
Later, after Mark left and the dishes were washed, I carried Emma to bed. She was sleepy against my shoulder, Bunny tucked under her chin.
At her doorway, she touched the locket she now wore on a soft ribbon beneath her pajamas.
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“Mommy didn’t leave because of me?”
The old fear was still there, smaller now but alive enough to need an answer.
I sat beside her on the bed.
“No,” I said. “Mommy did not leave because of you. Nothing that happened was your fault.”
“She loved me?”
“She loved you more than anything.”
Emma was quiet.
Then she reached for my hand and placed it over Bunny’s stitched heart.
“Bunny knew,” she said.
I looked at the worn rabbit, at the careful seam Priya had repaired beneath his ear.
“Yes,” I said. “I think Bunny knew.”
