box that the insurance company had returned to me in a plastic bag.
My driving glasses were nowhere.
Walter watched me pull a couch cushion off for the third time. “You know you once put your phone in the freezer.”
“Once.”
“Twice.”
“Traitor.”
He grinned, and for a second we both felt almost normal.
Then I stopped, cushion in hand, and looked up at the ceiling above the front door.
At the little camera Daniel had installed years ago, back when he worried about me living alone. The one I’d forgotten about the way you forget about the smoke detector.
The table where I always left my purse sat directly in its view.
My hands were shaking as I found the old app on my phone and scrolled back through the weeks. Back and back, to the morning of the crash.
Walter pressed against my side, watching the screen.
There
I was, rushing past in my coat. There was Lisa, coming in behind me.
“Oh,” Walter whispered. “There she goes.”
“Shh.”
On the tiny screen, my daughter glanced toward the kitchen, where I was banging around looking for my keys.
Then she opened my purse.
“Granny,” Walter breathed. “That’s your glasses case.”
We watched her slide it out, turn it over once in her hand, and slip it into her own handbag. Then she zipped the bag closed, smoothed her hair, and walked into the kitchen to tell me I could see just fine in my old pair.
I set the phone down on the table very carefully, as if it might break.
My stomach turned over.
For years I had called it love, the way I refused to see the worst in Lisa. I had called it loyalty, and patience, and being a good mother.
I couldn’t call it
that anymore.
Walter’s voice was barely a whisper. “Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart.”
“Is it because she wants me?”
I looked at him. At his worried eyes, and the too-short sleeves of the sweater he’d outgrown while I was asleep.
