“They already say whatever helps them sleep.”
She studied my face, perhaps searching for the boy who used to run whenever his mother called, the son who had mistaken obligation for love. I wondered when that boy had disappeared. Maybe he had not disappeared at all. Maybe he had simply grown too tired to keep carrying everyone.
“I need to tell you something,” Emily said.
The carefulness in her voice made me sit straighter.
“What is it?”
She looked down at our joined hands. “I started writing things down.”
“What things?”
“What they said. What they asked me to do. The bills they brought over. The times your mom came by when you weren’t home.”
A cold thread moved through me. “She came when I wasn’t there?”
Emily nodded.
“How often?”
“At first, once a week. Then more. Sometimes with your sisters. Sometimes alone.”
I thought of my mother on our couch, acting like a wronged queen. “Why?”
“She said family should have access to each other’s homes. She said because you paid most of the rent, she had a right to be here.”
“She had no right.”
“I know that now.”
The last word mattered.
Now.
I could hear the work behind it, the quiet rebuilding of a boundary that had been kicked down over and over. Emily reached for her purse beside the bed and pulled out a small notebook with a blue cover. The corners were worn. A grocery receipt marked one page.
“I wasn’t trying to build a case,” she said. “I just thought if I wrote it down, I wouldn’t feel crazy.”
I opened the notebook.
Dates. Times. Details.
Teresa arrived at 2:10, said Ethan should not have married someone “fragile.”
Brittany asked to borrow car, became angry when I said Ethan had keys.
Kayla ordered food on Ethan’s delivery app, said he would pay because he “owes his real family.”
Teresa said baby shower gifts should be stored at her house so she could “inspect what people bought.”
My eyes stopped.
“What baby shower gifts?”
Emily’s face changed.
I knew then there were still rooms in this house of secrets I had not entered.
“The ones from your coworkers,” she said.
My coworkers had thrown us a small shower two Fridays earlier during lunch. Diapers, onesies, bottles, gift cards, a handmade blanket from Mrs. Alvarez in payroll. I had brought everything home myself. Or I thought I had.
“They’re in the nursery closet,” I said.
Emily did not answer.