She’d helped me pick the pie.
I looked at her in the rearview mirror.
Eight years old.
Nate’s eyes.
Nate’s cowlick.
“I saw him,” I said.
“Did he love the pie?”
“He was busy, sweetheart.”
“In surgery?”
“In surgery.”
The lie came out of me so easily it scared me.
That’s how it starts, I thought.
One little lie to protect someone.
Then another.
Then you’re sitting in a parking garage for seven months.
At home, I made her mac and cheese.
I helped her with spelling.
I read her two chapters about a girl who could talk to foxes.
Then I went down to the laundry room.
I don’t know what I was looking for.
Proof, maybe.
Of something.
Of anything.
The scrubs were stacked on the shelf above the dryer.
Right where I’d folded them on Sunday.
I picked up a shirt.
I turned it over.
I held it up to the light.
Clean.
I picked up another.
Clean.
Another.
Clean.
Seven months of clean.
And the worst part wasn’t that he’d lied.
The worst part was that I’d noticed.
Back in April, I’d noticed.
I remember thinking, huh.
No stains this week.
I remember thinking, slow week, maybe.
I remember deciding not to ask.
Because asking meant another conversation about the hospital.
And I was so tired of the hospital.
So I folded them.
Every Sunday.
And I never asked.
I carried the whole stack upstairs.
I dumped it on the kitchen table.
And I waited.
At six-fifteen, his car pulled into the driveway.
Which brings us back to the kitchen.
To the scrubs.
To the keys on the floor.
To the man I’d been married to for eleven years.
Standing in the doorway like a stranger.
“Sit down,” I said.
He sat.
He put both hands flat on the table.
Right on top of the scrubs.
“Her name is Maddie Harmon,” he said.
I waited.
“She’s eight.”
“Same as Poppy.”
Something cold slid down my back.
“Last November, the night before Thanksgiving, she came into the ER.”
“Two in the morning.”
“Her appendix had burst.”
“She was in bad shape.”
