Chapter 7
“Because when I was a kid, my mother decided what was real in our house. If she said my father wasn’t upset, he wasn’t upset. If she said I wasn’t sick, I went to school. I learned that the easiest way to be loved by her was to agree with her. I just never stopped doing it.”
I reached over and took his hand. I think that was the day I started to forgive him.
He made changes that mattered. He took an allergy response course with me, the same kind of course his mother had been ordered to take. He learned to read Lily’s action plan until he could recite it by heart. He put a spare auto-injector in his car, in his office desk, and in his gym bag. He started taking Lily to her allergist appointments himself.
And he set a boundary with his mother that I never thought he would.
“You can see Lily again when she’s ready, when the court allows it, and when you can look her in the eye and tell her the truth,” he told Patricia on the phone. “Not that you’re sorry she got sick. That you’re sorry you didn’t believe her. Until then, the answer is no.”
Seven months after the lake, Lily turned eleven.
We had her party in Mrs. DeLuca’s backyard, under a string of paper lanterns and a big maple tree that was just starting to bloom. Every piece of food was allergy-safe. Every guest knew where the auto-injectors were kept. Hannah Brooks came with her fiancĂ© and a present wrapped in bright blue paper. Officer Ramirez stopped by in plain clothes with a card and a small stuffed police dog, which Lily immediately named “Radio.”
Mark came too.
I didn’t expect him. He stood awkwardly at the gate with his two kids and a gift bag. He told me he’d separated from Claire a few months earlier, partly because of what happened and partly because of a lot of things before it.
“I should have said something that day,” he said quietly. “I kept thinking someone else would. I’ve been thinking about that every day since. I wanted my kids to know that when someone’s in trouble, you don’t wait for someone else.”
I let them in.
Lily’s cousins hugged her like nothing had ever happened, the way only children can. By the end of the afternoon, all three of them were covered in frosting from an allergy-safe chocolate cake Mrs. DeLuca had spent two days perfecting.
Near the end of the party, a car pulled up in front of the house and parked across the street. It stayed outside the five-hundred-foot boundary. I recognized it immediately.
Patricia.
She didn’t get out. She just sat there. Daniel saw her too, and his whole body went still.
“Do you want me to handle it?” he asked.
Before I could answer, Lily tugged on my sleeve. She had seen the car.
“Is that Grandma?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
She looked at it for a long time. Then she looked up at me.
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