My mother often told me, “Don’t sit on Grandpa’s lap.” I never understood why. One day, I didn’t listen to her and sat down anyway. Grandpa smiled, leaned close to my ear, and whispered, “Can you come sleep beside me tonight?”

“Lily.”

That was my mother’s special voice.

The one that meant the conversation was over.

So I stopped asking.

Until that Sunday.

---

After Grandpa whispered to me, I climbed off his lap.

My mother immediately called me into the kitchen.

“What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

She stopped cutting vegetables.

“Lily.”

I looked at her.

She looked at me.

“Tell me exactly what he said.”

I swallowed.

“He asked if I could sleep beside him tonight.”

The knife in my mother’s hand stopped moving.

She didn’t speak.

“Mom?”

Nothing.

“Mom?”

She put the knife down.

“Did he say anything else?”

“He said not to tell you.”

My mother’s face changed.

Not angry.

Not confused.

Terrified.

“Why would he say that?”

“I don’t know.”

She turned away from me and stared through the kitchen window.

I watched her shoulders rise and fall.

Then she whispered,

“Oh, Dad…”

I didn’t understand.

“What?”

She turned around quickly.

“Nothing.”

“But you said—”

“Lily, promise me something.”

“What?”

“You stay with me tonight.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

That was when I became genuinely frightened.

Because my mother was not a woman who frightened easily.

She was the person who killed spiders with a shoe.

She was the person who once drove through a thunderstorm because she refused to let a grocery delivery sit outside.