She made me promise.
I understand now that I made the wrong promise. I was so careful to be the adult who didn’t take the decision away from her that I became the adult who let her carry it alone for eight months. Those two things looked identical from the inside and they are not the same thing at all.
She got a little better. That was the trap. Thursdays helped. She started eating dinner downstairs again. And every time she got a little better I told myself we had time.
Then Marlene decided to have a barbecue and invited both her sons.
Standing in my kitchen at four thirty that afternoon, I finally saw what the last eight months had actually been. Not a secret I was keeping for her. A door I was holding shut with my shoulder while the person on the other side got tired.
So I opened the drawer under the microwave.
Inside was a brown envelope. Thirty-one receipts from a therapy practice in Brantham, cash, in Ava’s name. My log, forty pages, in a spiral notebook. And a card from a woman named Detective Reyes that I had been given in April by a colleague and had never once had the courage to use.
