Chapter 3
I didn't yell after that. I think some part of me understood that yelling would have given the moment more heat than it needed and less clarity than I wanted. I asked Lenette to take Estelle upstairs, away from the broken dishes and away from whatever conversation was about to happen, and once they'd gone, I asked Lorna to explain herself, fully, without the crossed-arm composure she was still trying to hold onto.
She tried, at first, to walk the statement back — "You're taking this the wrong way," "It was just something to say in the moment," the kind of backpedaling that might have worked if I hadn't already watched my daughter's face when she heard it, if I hadn't already seen exactly how unsurprised Lenette had looked, like this was a fear she'd been quietly carrying for longer than one afternoon.
May you like
I asked Lenette directly, later that evening, once Estelle was asleep, whether this was the first time she'd heard anything like it from Lorna. It wasn't. Lorna had made comments for months — small ones, deniable ones, the kind that could always be explained away as jokes or venting after a hard day — about how different our lives would be "once things were more settled," about schools that might be "a better fit" for Estelle at a distance, about whether Lenette's role in the household would still make sense "long-term." Lenette had never brought any single comment to me directly, because none of them, on their own, had risen to the level of something concrete enough to raise.
Together, laid out in order, they told a very different story than the one Lorna had been presenting to me for the past year.
