Chapter 3
My niece hurried after us before we reached the edge of the yard and caught my sleeve with two trembling fingers.
Her eyes were wet, but there was something different in them now.
She wasn’t asking me to forgive her.
She wasn’t pretending what she’d done was harmless.
She looked at my six-year-old daughter pressed against my side, still muddy from her hair to the front of her shirt, and then she looked back at me.
“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t leave thinking putting her in the mud was all my idea.”
I stopped walking.
My daughter stopped with me because she still had both arms wrapped around my waist.
Behind us, the birthday party had gone strangely uneven.
Some people were still holding paper coffee cups.
A few stood near the table where they’d been sitting only minutes earlier, but nobody seemed interested in cake or presents anymore.
My sister was several steps behind us, watching her daughter with the tight expression of someone who suddenly realized she couldn’t control what was about to be said.
“Enough,” she snapped.
My niece flinched.
That tiny movement told me almost as much as her words had.
I looked down at her hand still clutching my sleeve.
“Then tell me what happened,” I said.
My sister immediately stepped closer.
“She doesn’t need to tell you anything.”
I didn’t turn toward her.
For the first time since I’d pulled my little girl out of the mud, I wasn’t interested in arguing with my sister.
I wanted to hear the fourteen-year-old standing in front of me.
Because less than ten minutes earlier, I had thought I understood what had happened.
I thought two children had collided at a birthday party.
I thought my niece had gotten angry.
I thought my sister had made an unforgivable decision in the heat of the moment.
That version was already awful.
May you like
The truth was worse.
It had started with something painfully ordinary.
