She was quiet for a moment, eating. Then she looked up.
"I don't want a new mom."
"Cassie's your mom," I said. I leaned in a little, making sure she saw the truth of it in my face. "She'll always be your mom, Lily. Nothing changes that. Not ever."
She held my gaze for a moment, checking that I meant it. Then she went back to her macaroni, apparently satisfied.
I picked my fork back up. The air in the kitchen felt a little lighter, like a storm had just rolled through and left the sky clear. Two minutes passed. Maybe three.
Then: "Do you have a girlfriend?"
I looked at her. I’d survived the "Dad" question and the "Heaven" question, but this one felt like a different kind of ambush. She was looking back at me with complete innocence, spoon halfway to her mouth.
"No," I said.
"Why not?"
"Just don't." It was the most honest answer I had. I hadn't stayed in one place long enough to keep a houseplant alive, let alone a relationship.
She seemed to find this unsatisfactory. "Gerald thinks you should get one," she said.
"Gerald the rabbit."
"He's very wise," she said seriously.
"I'll keep that in mind."
She ate another spoonful. I could see her thinking, which with Lily was always slightly alarming because you never knew what direction it was going to come from.
"What about that doctor lady?" she said.
I looked at her.
"From the funeral," she said. "She had nice hair. Gerald liked her." A pause. "She came here too. When I was sick. In the night." She said it matter-of-factly, like she'd been sitting on it for a while. "I was mostly asleep but I remember. She had cold hands." She tilted her head, considering the memory. "I didn't mind."
I looked at her. I hadn't known she'd clocked that—that she’d been conscious enough to register the temperature of Maddie’s skin, or the fact that she’d been in the room at all.
"Gerald thinks you should invite her for dinner," Lily said.
"I could."
"Gerald thinks youshould."
"Gerald should mind his own business."
Lily looked at the rabbit with an expression of great solemnity. "He says that's not possible," she said. "He cares about people."
I looked at her across the table—this small serious person with her mother's eyes and her rabbit and her absolute conviction that a stuffed animal had opinions about my love life—and something happened that I hadn't planned for.
I laughed.
It wasn't a polite laugh, or the careful half-smile I’d been managing for two weeks. It was a real one, the kind that came from somewhere low in the chest and didn’t ask for permission. It broke out of me before I could do a damn thing to stop it.
Lily stared at me, her eyes wide with a momentary shock.
Then, slowly, the corners of her mouth began to twitch. And then she was laughing too, bright and sudden and completely unguarded. It was the kind of laugh that had nowhere to hide. It was loud, genuinely loud. It was the Henley laugh, the one Cassie had carried like a spark her whole life and apparently hadn't kept to herself. It filled the kitchen. It bounced off the linoleumand the cupboards, chasing away the quiet that had lived there since the funeral.
We laughed until it wound down into nothing. We sat there grinning at each other across the cooling macaroni and cheese like two people who’d just discovered they spoke the same language and hadn't known it until now.