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“What happened to her?” you ask.
Your mother gives a light, incredulous laugh. “Honestly, Evan, I was just trying to help her with the baby and she started crying again. I told her to pull herself together before you got home. She’s been very dramatic lately.”
Lily says nothing.
Your mother notices. Of course she does. Denise has always been a student of pressure points.
“See?” she says, gesturing toward Lily with one manicured hand. “She gets like this and then refuses to talk. I’ve been worried about her for days.”
There it is.
Not even a pause. Not even a pivot. Straight to the script she has been building in private.
You step into the room. Carefully. Quietly. Every instinct in you wants to explode, but Noah is sleeping two feet away, and something tells you rage is the language your mother knows best. She has spent her whole life steering around other people’s anger, redirecting it, using it, painting herself as the reasonable one standing inside the storm.
So you keep your voice flat.
“I saw the video.”
For the first time in your life, your mother looks old.
Not physically. Strategically. Like all her familiar tricks were built for smaller rooms and weaker light. Her eyes flick to the crib camera mounted on the shelf. Then back to you.
“I have no idea what you think you saw.”
“You grabbed Lily by the hair.”
“I absolutely did not.”
“You threatened to tell me she was unstable if she told me what you were saying to her.”
Denise’s face hardens by degrees. Her nostrils flare. Something venomous slips beneath the practiced concern.
“So she’s been lying to you.”
“No,” you say. “She’s been surviving you.”
Lily makes a tiny sound, almost nothing. A swallow. A breath caught halfway. The room seems to listen to it.
Your mother drops the act.
“Surviving me?” she snaps. “I moved into this house to save both of you from drowning. She can barely manage herself, let alone a newborn. You’re never here. The baby cries all the time. The house is a mess. She looks half dead. Somebody had to take charge.”
“You don’t get to put your hands on my wife.”
“Your wife,” she repeats, with a laugh that curdles the air. “That girl has turned you against your own mother in less than a year.”
Lily flinches at girl.
That tiny flinch tells you Denise has called her that a hundred times.