We had never talked about her. Not really. We’d folded her away, the way people did back then, the way we were told was healthy — “you’re young, you’ll have more” — and we’d gone on and had Michael and Emma and a whole life, and we had never once, in thirty years, said her name at the dinner table.
I thought Greg had healed.
I thought I had.
I was wrong about both of us.
“Greg,” I breathed. “What is this. What’s happening to you.”
He sat back on his heels in the flower bed, holding the little box, and he finally told me.
PART 3
“I’ve been talking to her,” Greg said. “At night. For about two months now.”
I lowered myself down onto the cold grass beside him, because my legs wouldn’t hold me.
“Two months ago,” he said, “I had a health scare. That day I told you my back was bothering me — it wasn’t my back, Laura. I had chest pains at work. I went to the ER. I didn’t tell you. They ran tests, said it was stress, sent me home. But sitting in that ER, alone, thinking I might be dying—”
His voice cracked.
“All I could think about was Grace.
That I might die and go wherever she is, and I hadn’t thought about her, hadn’t SAID her name, in thirty years, because we buried her twice — once in the ground and once in the silence. And I got so scared that I’d spent thirty years pretending my daughter never existed, and that if there’s anything after this, she’d meet me as a stranger.”
I was crying now too.
“So I started coming down here at night,” Greg said. “After you fell asleep. I got out her box — I kept it, all these years, hidden in the crawl space, her hospital bracelet and the one photo and the little cap they put on her. And I’d sit in the rocking chair, the one we rocked Michael and Emma in but never her, because she never came home — and I’d just… talk to her.
