The Stories I Didn't Have

In the morning, Lily informed me that her uncle should come to breakfast because she had questions.

She had slept until eight, a miracle purchased with the previous night's exhaustion. I had slept in pieces, waking each time I dreamed Sarah was trying to tell me something across a crowded room.

"Questions about what?" I asked.

"Mommy. And dinosaurs."

I called Peter before I could think too much about it.

He answered carefully. "Is Lily all right?"

"She wants to interview you over pancakes."

There was a brief silence.

"I can be there in twenty minutes."

"Make it thirty. She hasn't found her other shoe."

"It's under Jasper," Lily said from the carpet. "He was sitting on it."

Peter heard her. His quiet laugh reached me through the phone, and for a second I resented how welcome it sounded.

We ate in the suite. I did not want to walk Lily through the lobby while the staff were still rearranging their faces around my identity.

Marisol came with fresh roses she had bought on her way in. I told her she didn't need to spend her money on us.

"They're for Sarah," she said. "You can buy your own."

Lily found that hilarious.

Peter arrived carrying a paper bag of pastries and looking like a man attending a disciplinary hearing. He asked where to put them. Lily moved a bowl and told him he could sit next to her.

"Was Mommy good at school?" she asked before he had finished pouring coffee.

"Mostly. She hated geometry."

"Daddy says Mommy was good at everything."

Peter glanced at me.

"Your daddy was in love with her. It may have affected his judgment."

I almost objected, then remembered Sarah attempting to assemble a bookshelf upside down while insisting the instructions were wrong.

"Her geometry was terrible," I admitted.

Lily looked delighted by this new weakness in her mother.

"What else was she bad at?"

"Baking on birthdays," Peter said. "She made me a cake once and used salt instead of sugar."

"How much salt?"

"Enough that we drank water for the rest of the afternoon."

"Did you eat it?"

"She was so proud of it that I tried. Then she tried a bite and accused me of being an idiot."

I laughed into my coffee.

Peter looked at me, surprised. Something passed across his face too quickly for me to name.

I knew the feeling, though. Relief could be embarrassing when it arrived before you had earned it.

Lily wanted to know whether Sarah had liked spiders, whether she had ever lost a tooth in her sleep, and whether her hair had always been curly. Peter answered slowly, making distinctions between things he remembered and things he only thought he remembered.

I appreciated that more than I expected.

Then he said, "She used to sing in the car when she was nervous."

"She did that with me," I said.

"Very loudly?"

"Very badly."

We looked at each other and smiled before either of us could prevent it.

The smile hurt afterward.

For years, I had been the person who knew which spoon Sarah preferred for cereal, why she checked a locked door twice, and how she sounded when she was trying not to laugh during an argument. Since her death, I had held those details as though keeping them safe was a job only I could do.

Now a man across the table knew things I didn't.

Part of me wanted to keep score. A worse part wanted his memories to be less important than mine.

I hated that part of myself, but I could feel it anyway.

When Lily went to the window with Marisol to look for boats, I took our plates to the kitchenette.

Peter followed with the coffee cups.

"You don't need to do that," I said.

He stopped.

I heard how it had sounded.

"I meant the cups."

"I know."

He put them down and waited.

"This is strange for me," I said eventually.

"It is for me too."

"You could have changed that."

"Yes."

I leaned against the counter.

"I want to hear the stories. I also want to be angry while you're telling them."

He nodded. "I can live with that."

It was an answer I could live with too.

At eleven, we went down to the library. Daniel had made sure it was empty for half an hour, but I asked him to leave the doors open. I didn't want our grief to require a closed building around it.

Sarah's portrait hung beside the shelves she had chosen. It wasn't a formal painting. It was a photograph taken during a site visit, her hair escaping its clip, sunlight catching the dust on her sleeve.

Lily put the roses beneath it.

"Mommy, I can read books with chapters now. Daddy still does the voices because his witch is funny."

"My witch is terrifying," I said.

"It sounds like a chicken."

Marisol made a small choking noise behind us.

Lily told Sarah about school and her missing tooth. Peter stood near the doorway, holding himself apart until she waved him over.

"You have to tell her something too."

He came slowly.

For a long time he looked at the photograph.

"I finally stopped putting it off," he said.

His voice was so quiet I barely heard it.

Then it was my turn.

I had rehearsed something on the plane. A gentle account of Lily's year, a promise that we were managing. The words seemed useless now.

"I found out you made terrible birthday cake," I said.

Lily giggled. My throat tightened.

"I would have eaten it too."

I could not say anything else.

I kept my hand on Lily's shoulder until we left the room.

Back upstairs, Peter opened the briefcase he had brought the night before.

"Thomas asked me to bring these when you and Marisol met," he said. "They've been in his safekeeping since Sarah was ill. He sent them to me last week."

There was a small wooden box, a folder, and an old brass key on a heavy oval tag.

317.

Marisol picked it up.

"Noah's room at Sunset Pines."

"I stayed there after Mom died," Peter said. "Dad and I couldn't live under the same roof. Apparently we thought three floors of motel would improve things."

"Did it?" I asked.

"Not much."

Sarah had kept the key after the motel closed. It would not open anything now, Peter explained. She had simply liked the weight of it.

That sounded like her. She had kept every house key we no longer needed in a kitchen drawer.

Inside the folder was a note addressed to me.

Please let Helen explain the enclosed documents before you decide what they mean. I have been a coward about telling you where the first loan guarantee came from. I don't want a piece of paper doing more damage than my silence already has.

I turned the page.

The amount was familiar enough that I knew it before I finished reading.

One hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

The loan that had saved our first hotel purchase when every other lender said no.

Beside the collateral description were two names.

Sarah Hale Vance.

Marisol Alvarez.

I looked across the table at the woman who had brought my daughter a blanket.

"You helped buy our first hotel?"