Chapter 3: What We Owed Her
Riley didn't say anything right away.
She just pulled her sleeve down over the tattoo — slowly, carefully, like she was tucking something in — and sat with her hands folded in her lap.
Tom was still on the floor.
I was still standing in the same spot I'd been in when the tape came off.
I hadn't moved.
I wasn't sure I could.
"Riley," I said.
My voice came out wrong.
Too small.
"How long did you plan this?"
"Since March." She didn't look up.
"When Gran told me what the doctors said.
She asked me not to tell you.
She said you had enough."
I thought about March.
I'd been driving my mother to appointments in March.
Sitting in waiting rooms with bad coffee and worse magazines, telling myself the numbers weren't as bad as they sounded.
"She talked to you about it?" Tom said.
He was still on the floor.
He hadn't tried to get up.
"She told you before she told us?"
"She told me things she couldn't tell you," Riley said.
"Because you'd try to fix them.
She didn't want them fixed.
She just wanted someone to listen."
Tom put his hand over his eyes.
"She said you were like that since you were little," Riley said, and now there was something almost gentle in her voice.
"She said you got it from Grandad.
She said it wasn't a flaw, it was just — how you love people."
Tom made a sound I had never heard from him before.
Not a word.
Just a sound.
"She loved you for it," Riley said.
"She told me that too."
I sat down on the couch properly.
My legs had made the decision without consulting me.
"The cards," I said.
"You said you kept all of them."
"In a box under my bed.
Since I was little." She finally looked at me.
"I thought you knew I did that."
I hadn't known.
I hadn't known any of it — the box, the cards, the conversations in March, the promise made in a doctor's waiting room or a kitchen or wherever my mother had taken my daughter's hand and said: *carry me somewhere they can't take me.*
"Can I see them?" I asked.
Riley looked at me for a long moment.
Then she nodded and went upstairs.
Tom got up off the floor.
He moved slowly, like something in him had shifted and he was still finding his balance.
He sat on the couch next to me, close enough that our arms were touching.
"I said terrible things to her," he said.
"So did I."
"I called the shop.
I actually looked up the number." He shook his head.
"I was going to report them."
"I know."
"She didn't fight back.
She just — took it."
"She made a promise," I said.
"She wasn't going to break it for us."
We sat with that.
Riley came back down with a shoebox.
Not a new one — an old one, the lid soft at the corners from years of being lifted and replaced.
She set it on the coffee table next to where her arm had been.
She didn't open it.
She just left it there and sat back down on the arm of the couch.
"You don't have to look tonight," she said.
"I just wanted you to know it existed."
Tom reached out and put his hand on the lid of the box.
He didn't open it either.
"Riley," he said.
"I owe you an apology.
A real one.
Not tonight — tonight I don't think I have the words yet.
But I owe you one."
She looked at him.
Something moved across her face that I couldn't name.
"Okay," she said quietly.
Max appeared in the doorway again in his pajamas, holding his stuffed rabbit by one ear.
"Is everyone crying?" he asked.
"Almost," Riley said.
He considered this.
Then he walked over, climbed onto the couch between me and Tom, and pulled the rabbit into his lap.
May you like
"Okay," he said.
"I'll stay."
