Dani stares at me. Her hands grip the camera in her lap and she has the look I've seen on monster kids a dozen times in four years—the one that says she expected me to side with the boys, or at least to pretend I didn't hear them.
"You okay, Dani?" I crouch next to her station.
She nods. Her braid swings forward over her shoulder. "They say stuff like that at school too."
"I know, sweetie." I touch the edge of the camera in her hands. "You want to keep shooting?"
She lifts the camera. Points it at the window where the afternoon light cuts across the reading nook.
"Yeah," she says. "I do."
Lily hasn't moved. She stands two feet away, watching me, mouth still half open. She doesn't say anything. She just looks at me like she's never seen me before.
I straighten up. Smooth my skirt and go back to the supply shelf, and my hands shake for thirty seconds before they stop.
Holly catches my eye from across the room and gives me a nod. She saw.
The workshop runs another forty-five minutes. Holly wraps up with a group review of the best shots. Dani's window photograph makes the top three, and her green skin flushes darker when Holly pins it to the display board beside a harbor shot and a close-up of rain on the library's front steps. Lily took that one.
The kids filter out. Parents collect them in pairs and trios. Holly packs up the cameras and gives me a side-hug that smells like darkroom chemicals and coconut shampoo. "Same time next week, Ellie. And for the record? Those little shits deserved worse."
"Language. We're in a library."
Holly rolls her eyes. "Sorry, those little angels deserved way worse." She packs up the last camera and heads for the door.
Garrett ducks through the door as Holly leaves, a wrapped object under one arm, the brown paper folded neat despite fingers the size of sausages. Nina crosses to him from where she's been stacking chairs, one hand resting on her belly, round now, visible even under the loose flannel.She talks enough for both of them, which I've learned is just how they work.
"We brought something for Lily," Nina says. "Is she here?"
"She's somewhere around here taking photos."
"Garrett made it. Show her, babe."
Garrett sets the package on the circulation desk and unwraps it. Two horses carved from walnut, polished until the grain catches the overhead light, standing nose to nose with their manes flowing in opposite directions. A bookend. The detail in the hooves, the tendons of the legs, the individual strands of mane. I've seen Garrett's carvings at the cabin, but this one hits different because he made it for a twelve-year-old girl who loves horses.
"This is beautiful," I say. "She'll lose her mind." I run my finger along one horse's mane.
"She mentioned horses at the clubhouse last week," Nina says. "Said she wanted one for her birthday, Colt of course said'absolutely not,' and this one nodded like that settled it and went home and started carving." She nudges Garrett's arm. "He's subtle."
He doesn't grin. He shifts his weight, his dark eyes sweeping the room the way they always do. But the tips of his ears darken, the minotaur version of a flush.
"Lily talks about you constantly," Nina says. She leans against the desk, one hand still on her belly. "At the clinic, at the clubhouse, everywhere. This morning she told Colt that Miss Frost thinks she should read Shirley Jackson next, and Colt apparently looked it up and said 'absolutely not' again, and Lily said 'Miss Frost already put it on hold for me.'" Nina laughs. "Kids don't attach to people who don't deserve it."
The library empties. The late-afternoon light turns amber and the building goes quiet.
Colt stands at the circulation desk. The paperback dangles from one hand, his index finger holding a page he never read. His glasses sit straight for once.
He doesn't say anything, just watches me work. I sort the returned cameras into their cases, stack Holly's handouts, cap two pens, and align the date stamp with the edge of the desk pad.
"Lily's mother would have done the same thing."
My hands stop moving.
He's never mentioned Maren to me. Not once, in six months of Saturday pickups and polite exchanges and the single real conversation we had a few days ago about George Eliot. I know she existed because of the wedding ring he stopped wearing, because Lily sometimes starts a sentence with "Mom used to" and then checks her father's face and changes the subject.
He said her name to me. He compared me to her. My throat tightens.
"What do you mean?"
