So, my Emma did the work.
She wasn’t smaller, not really, but she stood taller, and that was the part that mattered.
“You’re staring again,” Emma said.
“I’m allowed. I made you.”
My daughter rolled her eyes, smiling.
“Sarah called. She wants to know if we’re doing Sunday dinner.”
Sarah is my closest friend and neighbor.
“Tell her yes, and to bring that lemon thing.”
Later, after my daughter went to bed, I wandered into the small office that had been Daniel’s. The bottom drawer of his desk was locked. The week after the funeral, Raymond, my husband’s brother, had mentioned he thought he’d cleared everything sensitive out. Whatever remained was just old tax records, not worth the locksmith’s fee.
I’d taken my brother-in-law’s (BIL) word, partly out of trust, mostly because I was afraid of what a man keeps locked away from his wife.
There was also the monthly deposit, a modest widow’s allowance from Daniel’s estate that landed in our account like clockwork. Raymond had once explained it as the smaller of two arrangements, the other being some larger trust set aside for Emma under conditions I hadn’t bothered to ask about.
Grief made paperwork feel like a foreign language.
I touched the drawer handle, then pulled my hand back. Some doors I wasn’t ready to open. Not yet.
I didn’t know it then, but a door was about to open on its own.
On a quiet Saturday morning, I opened my front door to find a ghost in a tailored coat.
Brandon stood on my porch holding white roses, taller now, his shoulders squared as if he’d practiced the pose in a mirror. Every bone in my body went cold.
“Mrs. Carter,” he said softly. “I know I’m the last person you wanted to see. I just want a chance to apologize to Emma. To both of you.”
Behind me, I heard Emma’s footsteps stop in the hallway.
“You filmed my daughter eating lunch and called her an animal,” I replied.
