Not innocence.
Not justification.
A wound.
Rebecca had spent eighteen months converting grief into control because control was easier than absence.
I understood it.
I did not forgive it.
Not yet.
She took a step toward me.
I lifted my hand.
She stopped.
“No.”
Her face tightened.
“I’m not ready for you to touch me.”
Rebecca nodded.
A tear dropped from her chin.
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
She looked at my cheek.
“Yes.”
I picked up my purse.
“Then understand this too. You do not get to decide tonight when I forgive you.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to apologize until I make you comfortable.”
“I know.”
“And you never put your hands on me again.”
Her answer came immediately.
“Never.”
“If it happens again, I leave. Completely.”
Rebecca closed her eyes.
“Okay.”
I walked toward the door.
This time she did not stop me.
Then, behind me, I heard the piano bench shift.
I turned.
Rebecca was kneeling.
For one startled second I thought she had collapsed.
Instead she had lowered herself beside the piano.
She switched on her phone flashlight.
Then she crawled beneath it.
Exactly where Sophie had been.
“What are you doing?”
Her voice came muffled from below.
“Looking.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know.”
I almost told her to get up.
Then she became still.
“Mom.”
Something in her voice made me walk back.
Rebecca backed out slowly.
Dust streaked one sleeve of her burgundy blouse.
In her hand was nothing.
Her expression, though, had changed.
“There’s something I forgot.”
I waited.
Rebecca sat on the floor.
“When Dad showed me the plate, I asked why he put the musical notes beside our names.”
I remembered the tiny engraved symbols.
“What did he say?”
She looked up at me.
“He said yours was for the songs you taught me.”
Rebecca’s mouth trembled.
“And mine was for the songs I made you keep teaching.”
My vision blurred.
Rebecca wiped her face.
“I thought he was just being sentimental.”
I lowered myself carefully onto the piano bench.
Thomas had never been particularly good at grand gestures.
