Lauren hadn’t moved from the doorway. She stood with her hands at her sides, and tears were running silently down her face. I walked over to her. She flinched—actually flinched, like she expected me to hit her—and that small involuntary movement told me everything I needed to know about what she thought of herself right now.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Emily, I am so sorry. I knew something was wrong. I knew it didn’t make sense. But it was easier to believe her than to question her. It’s always been easier.”
“I know.”
“I shouldn’t have said those things at dinner. About you showing up empty-handed. About—” She couldn’t finish.
“You didn’t know.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
“No. It’s not.” I held her gaze. “But it’s the truth. And I’d rather have the truth now than pretend it didn’t happen.”
She nodded, a jerky, graceless nod, and then she sank onto the bottom step of the staircase and put her head in her hands.
I left her there and went upstairs.
Lily was awake.
She was sitting up in her bed with her stuffed rabbit in her lap, staring at the window. The morning light caught the fine gold strands in her hair and turned them luminous. She looked like something out of a painting—something too fragile and too beautiful for the world to have invented.
“Hey, baby,” I said from the doorway.
“Mommy, why was that lady yelling last night?”
I crossed the room and sat on the edge of her bed. “That lady is Grandma. She was very upset about some grown-up things.”
“Was she upset at you?”
I thought about lying. I thought about saying no, of course not, everything was fine. But Lily had been in that room. She had seen the spit hit my cheek. She had heard the word “burden” aimed directly at her. She deserved a version of the truth that respected what she had witnessed.
“Yes,” I said. “She was upset with me. But it wasn’t because I did something wrong. Sometimes adults get confused and say mean things that aren’t true.”
“Did she mean what she said about me?”
The question split me open.
I pulled her into my arms and held her against my chest, and I could feel her heartbeat, that fast little hummingbird pulse, and I breathed in the smell of her hair—shampoo and sleep and something indefinably her—and I said, “No, sweetheart. You are not a burden. You are the best thing that ever happened to me. You are the best thing that ever happened to anyone in this house.”
She pressed her face into my neck. “I don’t like going to Grandma’s house.”
“You don’t ever have to go again.”
She pulled back and looked at me. “Promise?”
“Promise.”
She considered this with the serious gravity that only five-year-olds possess, then nodded once and went back to her rabbit.
I stayed with her until Ethan came upstairs and told me that Dad had gone outside to talk to my mother. Through Lily’s window, I could see their two figures by the Camry—Dad standing with his hands in his pockets, my mother sitting on the hood, both of them perfectly still.
They talked for twenty minutes.
When Dad came back inside, his face was wet, but he was standing straighter than I’d ever seen him. He stood in the hallway and looked at me and said, “She’s going home. She’s not happy, but she’s going home.”
“Are you okay?”
He considered this. “I will be.”
