She considered this with the seriousness only a seven-year-old can produce. “Like a referee?”
“Kind of like a referee.”
“Good,” she said. “Because sometimes Grandma isn’t very kind.”
I did not push her to say more. Susan Bell had warned me that pulling information out of Lily, even gently, risked teaching her that her job was still to report on the adults around her. So I only said, “You don’t have to figure any of that out anymore, baby. That’s the grown-ups’ job now.”
She nodded, satisfied, and went back to her ice cream, and I drove home with my daughter beside me and my heart — my newly, mechanically reliable heart — beating in a rhythm I could finally trust.
PART 7
The next three months did not look like a movie montage. There was no single triumphant morning where everything became easy. There were court-ordered supervised visits that felt stiff and awkward at first, a case worker sitting in the corner of a family visitation room while Daniel tried to build a puzzle with Lily under fluorescent lighting that reminded me too much of the courtroom. There were nights Lily woke up asking if my heart was going to “do the bad thing again,” and I had to explain, in words a seven-year-old could hold onto, what a pacemaker actually was — that it was like a tiny, patient helper living just under my skin, always watching, always ready to nudge my heart back into rhythm if it forgot how.
