Grandma’s hand shot out and slapped his away so fast the attendants froze mid-step.
“Nobody touches that.”
“Okay. Okay.” Bryce pulled his hand back like he’d touched a stove.
Her expression didn’t soften. “I mean it.”
“I got it,” I said quickly. “Good,” she said, and I could hear it — not annoyance, not the ordinary stubbornness I’d grown up with. Something sharper. Something closer to fear wearing the mask of authority.
The suitcase came inside still strapped to the wheelchair, and nobody dared suggest moving it anywhere else.
We settled her in the living room where she could see the whole party, and relatives descended on her in waves — hugging her, angling for photographs, asking how she felt in the particular tone people use with the very old and the very sick.
She tolerated it the way she tolerated everything. “Yes, I’m alive. Yes, I’m comfortable. No, I don’t need another pillow.” When my mother hovered a beat too long, fussing with her blanket, Grandma finally snapped, “If I need something, I’ll ask,” and Mom stepped back wearing the exact defeated expression she’d worn her whole life around her own mother.
For a while, things felt almost normal. Kids ran between the kitchen and the living room. Someone knocked over a cup of juice near the hallway. Bryce’s sister took an alarming number of photos of a banner that said ONE.
But Grandma wasn’t acting normal, and I was the only one who seemed to notice.
She barely looked at the decorations. She barely looked at the cake. She watched Sophie — only Sophie — with an intensity that didn’t match a woman simply enjoying her great-granddaughter.
PART 3
At first I told myself it was sentimental. Grandma had only seen Sophie a handful of times in her life. Maybe she was just trying to memorize her face before she ran out of chances to.
But the longer I watched her watch my daughter, the less that explanation held together.
When Bryce carried Sophie across the room, Grandma’s eyes tracked her like a hawk following something small through grass. When my mother bounced her on one knee, Grandma leaned forward in her chair. When I finally set Sophie down on the rug with her toys, Grandma went so still I thought, for one terrible second, that something had happened to her.
I crouched beside her wheelchair. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“You keep staring at Sophie.”
“She’s my great-granddaughter.”
“I know that, Grandma.”
She looked at me then, and for a moment I was sure she was about to say something that would explain everything. Instead she looked away, out toward the window.
“Enjoy the party, Elena.”
That answer bothered me more than any explanation would have. Grandma was never vague unless she wanted to be, and she never wanted to be vague without a reason.
I didn’t have time to press her, because Bryce was already calling everyone over for the cake.
We buckled Sophie into her high chair. Someone perched a paper crown, slightly crooked, on her head. Phones rose into the air on every side of the room. Bryce lit the single candle, and Sophie stared at the small flame with the wide, unblinking wonder that only a one-year-old can manage, and I stood behind her chair with both hands resting on the tray, and for one bright, ordinary moment I let myself believe the whole day was exactly what it looked like.
I glanced across the room at Grandma.
She wasn’t smiling.
Then the singing started. “Happy birthday to you—”
Sophie clapped along, off-rhythm, and everyone laughed, and Bryce leaned over to whisper in my ear, “She has no idea what’s happening.”
