Ten years had not changed the answer.
“I can’t,” Katherine said.
“Then you can leave right now.”
She stood.
She stood up from my grandmother’s table, and she looked at my daughters — Amelia at my chair, Greta on the stairs — and I want to be fair and tell you that something crossed her face, some small ghost of the woman who’d had a baby in that hospital.
It crossed.
It kept going.
“You’ve changed,” she said, at the door.
“No,” I said. “I sat still. You’re the one who kept moving.”
She left.
The bracelet flashed once under the porch light, and then the dark had her.
I sat in my chair in the hall for a long moment, looking at the door.
Ten years ago, I hadn’t been able to follow a door.
I’d been in a hospital bed with a baby on my chest and a three-year-old in the hallway, and the door had closed, and I had listened to a suitcase go down a corridor and had not been able to do one single thing about it.
This time I’d been in front of the door.
This time she’d had to walk past me to get to it.
That’s not nothing.
That’s ten years.
Amelia let out a breath.
“She’s not coming back, is she.”
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