Then Zoe asked him something I wasn’t expecting.
“Do I have to go back there?”
Mark looked at her.
“To my house?”
She nodded.
He didn’t hesitate.
“No.”
Zoe stayed with me.
For the first time since the phone call, Mark looked genuinely broken.
Because Miranda hadn’t only insulted his ex-wife.
She’d made his daughter feel unsafe in her own face.
Mark moved into his brother’s apartment three days later.
He never told me every detail of what happened between him and Miranda.
He didn’t need to.
The only thing that mattered to me was that when Zoe said she didn’t want to be around Miranda, her father believed her the first time.
But the harder repair happened quietly.
Between Zoe and me.
One evening, she brought the plastic bin upstairs.
“Can we go through these?”
So we did.
This time she didn’t study my face like evidence.
I told her stories.
She laughed at my eyebrows.
I retaliated by showing her Mark’s haircut from 2003.
Eventually we reached the green dress.
Zoe held the photograph for a while.
“This was the one,” she said.
“The one what?”
“I kept coming back to.”
She studied my face one last time.
Then she put the photograph back without touching her own face.
