Dana smelled like peppermint gum and the same rose hand cream Rachel used to keep in her purse. She had Rachel’s eyes too, though Rachel’s had always laughed more easily. Dana did not say anything cruel about Evan in front of Lily, but her jaw tightened whenever his name came up.
“He loves you,” Dana said that first night while pulling fresh sheets over the guest bed. “And he failed you. Both can be true.”
Lily lay awake a long time after that, staring at the ceiling fan.
Both can be true.
It felt like the first honest sentence anybody had offered her in days.
Evan called every evening. At first Lily let the phone ring. Then Dana began leaving it on the nightstand and saying, “You don’t have to answer, but you get to choose.”
On the fourth night Lily picked up.
There was silence for a moment. Then Evan said, in a voice already cracked with emotion, “Hi, bug.”
He had called her that since she was little. Lovebug, cuddlebug, sleepy bug. After Rachel died, the nickname stuck because it was one of the few things that still felt like home.
Lily said nothing.
“I understand if you don’t want to talk,” Evan said. “I just… I need you to hear me say that none of this was your fault. Not one second of it. I should have seen. I should have stopped it long before—”
His voice broke.
Lily stared at the wall.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
She wanted to say, You were supposed to know.
Instead she asked, “Did she sell Mom’s bracelet?”
The question seemed to gut him.
“No,” he said. “Police found it in her jewelry case. The ring too. I have them. I’ll keep them safe till you want them.”
Lily closed her eyes.
“Okay.”
