Chapter 10: The Lemon Room
Six months later, Lily's art room had a big table and good light.
She had covered one wall with drawings — horses, mostly, and one large portrait of Anna that she'd worked on for three weeks and refused to show me until it was finished.
When she finally turned it around, I had to leave the room for a few minutes.
When I came back, Lily was standing at the table mixing colors like nothing had happened, which was exactly right.
On a Saturday in October, I was making coffee in the kitchen when Lily came downstairs in her pajamas and sat at the counter.
"Dad," she said, "do you think Mom knew it was going to work out?"
I thought about it.
"I think she knew she was doing everything she could."
"That's not the same thing."
"No," I said.
"It isn't."
Lily considered that.
"I think she knew," she said finally.
"Because she picked me.
She could have hidden the recordings anywhere.
She picked me."
I set a mug in front of her — hot chocolate, the good kind, the kind Anna used to make on cold mornings.
"You're right," I said.
"She picked you."
Lily wrapped both hands around the mug.
"I'm not scared anymore," she said.
"In case you were wondering."
"I was wondering," I said.
"You can stop."
I sat down across from her at the counter where we had eaten a thousand breakfasts and would eat a thousand more, in the house where a guest room was now a lemon-yellow art room, in the life that Anna had fought to protect from a hospital bed with a smartwatch and a child she trusted completely.
Outside, the October light came through the kitchen window the way it always did at this hour — low and golden, the kind that makes everything look like it's been kept carefully.
Lily drank her hot chocolate.
I drank my coffee.
Neither of us said anything for a while, and it was enough.
---
Anna never got to see justice served — but she made sure it would be.
She built the case from a hospital bed and trusted her daughter to carry it home.
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