Then she lay back down. Not away from me—she moved back against my side, her head on my shoulder, her hand flat on mychest where it had been before. I put my arm around her. She let me. We lay there in the afternoon light with the air finally clear and the room quiet.
"I haven't forgiven you," she said. "I want to be clear about that."
"I know."
"But I think I'm—" She paused, her fingers curling slightly into my shirt. "I think I'm working on it."
"That's enough," I said. "That's more than enough."
Chapter Forty-Six
Jack
She clocked it before we'd made it ten steps from the gate.
I felt her looking at me—that particular Lily assessment, the one that missed nothing—and then she said, without preamble:
"What happened to your face?"
"What?"
"It looks different."
I kept my eyes on the street ahead. "I don't know what you mean."
She didn't look away. We kept walking, our shadows stretching out in front of us.
"You're smiling," she said.
"I smile."
"Not like that."
"Like what?"
She took a second to work it out. "Like Gerald," she said finally. "When he gets the good spot on the radiator."
I had no response to that. We walked past the cat on the wall—she pointed, I nodded, the usual—and turned onto the main street. It was a good afternoon. The kind Clear Creek did in latespring, the light going gold at the edges, the air doing something that wasn't quite warm but wasn't cold either.
"Did something good happen?" Lily said.
"It was a good day."
"At the garage?"
"Garage was closed today."
She processed that, her brow furrowing. "So what did you do?"
"Laundry. Tidied the house."
She stopped for a second to look at me. Even at five—nearly six, as she’d reminded me twice this week—she had a very effective look for when she knew she was being managed.
"And?" she said.
"And what?"
"You don't smile like that about laundry."