I shake my head and check on Cassie. She’s still asleep, curled up on the couch so tightly she’s nearly a fossil, the blanket bunched around her. Rolo, ever faithful, is wedged behind her knees, his ears twitching in some canine dream. I don’t want to wake her. I just stand there, watching the soft pulse of her breath, and think of all the ways I’ve failed her, starting with uprooting her from the only life she knew and ending, most recently, with last night’s silent, shattered drive back from the boardwalk.
When the kettle screams, I jump, nearly spilling water down the front of my terrycloth robe. The noise wakes Cassie, too. She shuffles into the kitchen, hair a feral tumble.
“Morning,” she says, voice small.
“Hey, bug,” I manage, pouring orange juice with hands that shake a little more than I’d like, and nudge the cup her way. She stares at it, then at me, her gaze too direct for comfort.
“You okay?” she asks.
“I’m fine.” I try to sound normal, but the words come out flat, the vowels bent at odd angles. I busy myself with the toaster, loading two slices of bread with the kind of mechanical precision that would have delighted Kyle and now only makes me feel vaguely ill.
Cassie sits at the table, Rolo stationed at her feet, and watches me. There’s an old clock on the wall, the kind that ticks with a wet, almost living sound. The three of us form a triangle of worry, each pretending not to notice the others’ discomfort.
After a few minutes, Cassie says, “What did you do yesterday?”
I flinch so hard I nearly drop the butter knife. “Not much. Just...got a coffee, sat on the beach, walked along the boardwalk for a while.”
“Did you see Nathan?”
I open my mouth to lie, but I can’t do it. “Yes, I ran into him at the coffee shop.”
“Did he ask about me?”
“No, Cass. Not specifically.”
She accepts it, or pretends to, and smears grape jelly across her toast. “I finished my drawing last night,” she says. “The one of the ocean. When is Nathan coming over again? I can’t wait for him to see it.”
“I’m not sure, honey,” I say, careful to keep my eyes on the butter, the toast, anything but that face full of hope. “He’s got a lot going on right now.”
Cassie chews slowly, and when she finally swallows, she says, “But you still like him, right?”
She’s staring at me in a way that’s all child and not child at all, some hybrid of the little girl who names her stuffed animals and the new, wary adolescent taking shape under my nose. My instinct is to insist on a version of the truth so gently it’s nearly fiction, but Cassie’s not buying any of it. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, sets the toast down, and folds her arms, an uncanny mirror of the posture I used to take with my own mother when I wanted to pick a fight but hadn’t found the words yet.
“Did something happen?” she asks, her voice careful, as if trying to tiptoe around a tripwire.
“Nothing happened, bug,” I lie. “It’s just…Nathan and I are… It’s complicated.”
“Are you mad at him?”
The truth is a mess I can’t parse. “I don’t know,” I say, which is the closest I can get to honesty this morning. “Maybe. Maybe just sad.”
She accepts it, but there’s a new wariness in her face. She takes another bite of her toast, then asks, “Are we still staying here?”
“No,” I say. “Not anymore. I think it’s best if we return to the cottage.”
She chews, thoughtful. “Good. I like it there. Feels like home.” She glances toward the closed door of Sara’s bedroom, where the faint hum of the oxygen machine has been running since before sunrise. “She’s not going to get better, is she?”
“No, bug,” I say, and at first I think my voice has disappeared into the hush, but she’s listening intently. “She won’t. But we’re going to be okay. We’re going to be with her as much as we can.”
Cassie’s silent for a while, picking at her toast. “Why does everyone we love go away?”
I have no answer. None that I’d want to give her, anyway. The universe just doesn’t know what to do with people who love too openly, so it whittles them down, one by one, until you’re left with an empty kitchen and a child who understands the math of loss better than she should.
The phone rings again, insistent. Cassie watches, waiting to see if I’ll answer.
I let it ring out.
When the silence returns, thicker and more final than before, she looks at me with a kind of gentle resignation. “Done,” she says and stands to take her plate to the sink.