Could I lie to her?
"Are you going to leave me?"
Everything in me stopped.
Here was a child who'd already lost both her parents. Now she'd watched her last person cry over something she'd delivered, and she was doing the math.
"No," I said. "No, no, no. Come here."
She climbed into my lap and held my collar in her fists.
"Are you going to leave me?"
"I'm not going anywhere," I told her, over and over, until her breathing slowed.
But I'd be lying if I said my head was quiet. Because I kept seeing that line he'd made her repeat. You still have no idea why he chose you.
And here's what my mind did with it, and I'm not proud of this.
I thought I finally understood. Daniel knew I was a mother once. He'd seen what happened to my child.
You still have no idea why he chose you.
Maybe he'd looked at a broken woman with an empty space where a daughter used to be and thought, There. That's who can fill it.
The memories I had of Daniel began to feel different. I no longer knew how much of what I had seen in him was love and how much had been guilt. I hated him a little bit more.
"I think I finally get why your dad chose me," I said, mostly to myself.
"But he didn't. That's what's weird."
I hated him a little bit more.
I looked down at her. "What?"
"Dad didn't choose you." She said it so plainly. "I did."
"Lily, sweetheart, I don't understand."
She picked at the hem of her sleeve. "It was before you got married. Before Dad even liked you like that. You'd been doing my hair a lot. You sat with me when Dad was too tired. So one night I asked him something."
"Dad didn't choose you."
She glanced up. "I said, 'Daddy, is this what having a mommy is like?'"
I can't tell you what those words did to me.
"He asked me what I meant. And I said you knew how I liked my hair. You remembered stuff I told you. You helped when I got scared, and you made sure I had what I needed." She shrugged, a tiny six-year-old shrug. "And you stayed. You always stayed."
"What did he say?"
I can't tell you what those words did to me.
