“Ava,” Daniel said. “What is that?”
She was looking at the top receipt. Her mouth was open a little.
“You paid cash,” she said.
“Every week.”
“For eight months.”
“Thirty-one of them,” I said. “You missed two in February, when you had the flu.”
And Ava Whitmore put both hands over her face and made a sound I had never heard a person make in my kitchen, and sat straight down on the floor with her back against the dishwasher.
Daniel crossed the room fast. “What is this? What did you do?”
He said it to me.
I want that on the record, because it’s the exact moment I stopped being able to imagine a version of the rest of my life with him in it. His daughter was on the floor of our kitchen and he turned around and asked me what I had done.
“Nothing,” I said. “I paid for her therapy.”
“Therapy for what?”
I looked at Ava.
“That’s hers,” I said. “I promised her eight months ago that I would never say it for her. I’m still keeping that. But Daniel, I’m not keeping the promise that it stays in this house, because that one is killing her, and I should have broken it in December.”
