“Neither do half the adults here,” I whispered back, and he grinned, and I turned to see if Grandma had caught the joke.
She was crying.
Not the quiet, private kind of tears people wipe away before anyone notices. Tears were running freely down her face, and she made no move to stop them, and something about the sheer size of her grief in that small, frail body made my stomach drop before I even understood why.
I moved around the table toward her.
“Grandma?”
She pointed one shaking finger at my daughter.
“Take off her sock.”
The room went silent in a way I had never heard a room go silent before — not polite quiet, not embarrassed quiet, but the particular silence of twenty people simultaneously deciding something was wrong.
“What?” I said.
“Her left sock. Now.”
I stared at her, and she stared back, and there was no stubbornness left in her face at all. There was only fear.
She didn’t answer me. Instead her eyes moved past me, toward the guests gathered near the hallway, and settled on one person in particular.
“Lock the front door.”
My husband laughed, the nervous kind of laugh people use when they’re hoping a joke will retroactively make something less strange. “Why?”
Grandma’s fingers closed around my wrist, cold and surprisingly strong.
And for the first time in my entire life, I watched terror move across my grandmother’s face.
PART 4
“Lock the front door,” she said again, and this time nobody laughed.
The room was so quiet I could hear Sophie’s small hands slapping happily against her high chair tray, the only sound left that hadn’t yet understood what was happening.
Bryce looked from Grandma to me. “Elena?”
“Just do it.”
He hesitated half a second, then crossed the room. The deadbolt clicked into place with a sound that felt far louder than it should have. Relatives exchanged confused glances. My mother pushed forward.
“Mom, what is going on?”
Grandma didn’t answer her. Her eyes never left Sophie.
“Take off the sock.”
I crouched beside the high chair, my hands unsteady in a way I couldn’t explain yet. Sophie kicked happily as I reached for her foot.
“It’s okay, baby,” I murmured, more to steady myself than her.
I pulled off the small white sock.
At first I saw nothing unusual — just my daughter’s foot, soft and small, exactly as it had looked every day of her life.
Then Grandma made a sound behind me. Almost a gasp.
There, just above her heel, was a small brown mark, no larger than the tip of my thumb. An irregular birthmark. I had seen it a hundred times. I had never once thought about it.
