She lowered her eyes.
“I know.”
Todd remained standing near the door, holding his yellow legal pad against his chest.
“I wrote down what we thought it would cost to have you live with us,” he said. “Rent, utilities, food. I figured if we made everything clear, nobody would feel taken advantage of.”
“Did you ask yourself what I would be giving up?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
“Did you think about what it would feel like to be sixty-seven years old, to move out of the only home you had known for thirty-one years, and then be told that the next place you could live would be a basement? Did you think about how it would feel to be charged for the privilege of living with my own daughter?”
Michelle began to cry.
Not loudly. Not the way people cry when they want somebody to comfort them.
