Chapter 8: Lily Asks a Question
My daughter found the photograph on a Tuesday.
I had been careful.
The folder Crawford had given me was in the top drawer of my desk, which I kept locked.
But Lily was nine and curious and had apparently found the small key I kept in the ceramic dish on the kitchen counter, the one shaped like a cat that she had made for me in second grade.
I was on the phone with my attorney when she appeared in the doorway of my home office, holding the photograph of Ryan and Sandra and the two boys.
She wasn't crying.
She was just looking at it.
I told my attorney I would call back.
I hung up and held out my hand.
She came and sat beside me on the small sofa near the window, and she put the photograph on her knee, and we both looked at it.
"Is that Daddy?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Who are the boys?"
I had thought about this moment.
I had talked to a child therapist about it.
I had rehearsed different versions of the answer in the shower, in the car, in the space between waking and sleeping.
"They're his sons," I said.
"From before he met me."
She was quiet for a moment.
"He has other kids?"
"Yes."
"Does he love them?"
"I think he does."
She looked at the photograph again.
The older boy was squinting into the sun.
The younger one was laughing at something outside the frame.
"Are they my brothers?"
I hadn't expected that question.
Not at this angle.
"Half brothers," I said.
"Yes."
She turned that over.
"Can I meet them?"
"Maybe someday.
That would be up to their mom."
She handed me the photograph and leaned against my arm.
I put my arm around her.
"Is Daddy coming back?" she asked.
"No, sweetheart."
"Because of the other family?"
"Partly.
And because he did some things that weren't right.
Things that hurt people.
He has to answer for those things."
She was quiet for a long time.
"Did he love us?" she asked.
"Me and you?"
I looked at the window.
The afternoon light was coming through at a low angle, the way it did in October, turning everything slightly gold.
"I think he loved you," I said.
"In the way he was capable of."
She seemed to accept that.
She tucked her feet up under her on the sofa and rested her head against my shoulder.
"Mom?"
"Yes?"
"I'm glad Mr.
Crawford came."
I pressed my lips to the top of her head.
"So am I," I said.
We sat there until the light changed.
She fell asleep against my arm, and I didn't move, and outside the window the neighborhood went quiet the way it did in the early evening, and I thought about Sandra in Phoenix doing something similar, and Vanessa in whatever apartment she had gone back to, and Ryan in a holding facility answering questions about wire transfers and falsified documents.
And I thought about the house.
Our house.
May you like
The one we had built together nine years ago.
It was still mine.
