I don’t push. Not yet. With Lila, you can’t pry feelings out. You’ve got to wait until they loosen on their own.
So I stay. I stretch out along the edge of the couch, close enough that my leg touches her hip, and flip absently through the mail on the coffee table. Some feed catalog, two bills, a postcard from one of Mom’s cousins who moved to Arizona and won’t shut up about her citrus trees.
Five minutes tick by. Ten. She doesn’t move.
“Want me to put something on?” I ask. “Cartoons? That show with the singing vegetables you claim to hate but always watch anyway?”
Her lips twitch. “No.”
That’s clue number three and the clincher. Kid turning down TV? We’ve crossed into serious territory.
“Alright,” I say, setting the mail down. “You wanna tell me what’s actually going on?”
She keeps her gaze locked on some point by the window. The late afternoon light slants across her face. Her lashes look even longer in it, making her seem both too big and too small at the same time.
Silence stretches.
Then, so quietly I almost miss it:
“Do people… forget about you?”
“Sometimes,” I say carefully. “People get busy, or scared, or they don’t know how to show up right. But if you’re asking if somebody can just stop caring about you and erase you from their brain like a chalkboard…” I shake my head. “No, sweetheart. Not if they ever really cared in the first place.”
She swallows. “What if they said they’d come back and they didn’t?”
There it is. The shape of the ache.
“Who’re we talking about?”
Her fingers tighten in the quilt. The tip of her nose goes pink.
“Miss Faith.”
The room tilts.
Because this isn’t about me and Faith anymore. This is about what I let my daughter see. What I let her hope for. What I might have handed her without realizing it.
“She said she’d come visit,” Lila continues. “But she didn’t come back. Not even once.” Her little jaw tightens. “Maybe she doesn’t like me anymore.”
The idea of anyone not liking my kid is laughable and infuriating in equal measure.
“Hey now,” I say, shifting so I’m angled toward her. “Look at me.”
She does, reluctantly.
“Faith likes you,” I say. “A lot.”
“How do you know?” she asks, and it’s not defiant, just tired. She’s run out of believing for the day.
“I saw her with you,” I say simply. “Saw the way she listened when you talked about your school project. The way she let you put glitter stickers on her sleeves and didn’t even flinch. The way she smiled when you drew that picture of the ranch with her in it.”
“She laughed a lot,” Lila says, barely audible.
“She did,” I agree. “Because she liked being here. With us. With you.”
A tear finally escapes and slips down her cheek. She swipes at it angrily. “Then why didn’t she come back?”
Because I didn’t make it easy.
