“I don’t want to take your place,” I told her. “I need you to hear me say that.”
Her eyes filled up immediately. “I want to know my son,” I went on. “And if there’s anything left to save, I want my sister back too.”
She was quiet for a long time. Then she nodded slowly. “We do it slow.”
“And honest,” I said. “No more stories. Not even small ones.”
“Yes. Honest.”
So that’s what we did. Slowly.
The first few weeks were rough in ways I hadn’t fully braced for. Claire would start telling me about Owen’s first tooth, or his first day of preschool, or the fever that scared her half to death when he was two — and then she’d stop herself mid-sentence, worried the memories were hurting me.
They were. I still wanted every single one of them anyway. Pretending those eight years hadn’t happened would only have built a new lie on top of the old one, and I was done with those.
