Greta looked back.
Thirteen years old, my grandmother’s chin, a book still in her hand because she’d been reading when the knock came, and she did not look away, and she did not come down, and she did not help.
She waited.
And I watched my ex-wife do a calculation she had done once before, in a doorway, with a suitcase.
Ten years had not changed the answer.
“I can’t,” Katherine said.
“Then you can leave right now.”
She stood.
She stood up from my grandmother’s table, and she looked at my daughters — Amelia at my chair, Greta on the stairs — and I want to be fair and tell you that something crossed her face, some small ghost of the woman who’d had a baby in that hospital.
It crossed.
It kept going.
“You’ve changed,” she said, at the door.
“No,” I said. “I sat still. You’re the one who kept moving.”
She left.
The bracelet flashed once under the porch light, and then the dark had her.
I sat in my chair in the hall for a long moment, looking at the door.
Ten years ago, I hadn’t been able to follow a door.
