“I don’t know what she thinks, baby.”
***
Then came the teenage years.
Whenever one of them got through something hard, I’d say quietly, “You were chosen this morning.”
They rolled their eyes the way teenagers do when they secretly need to hear something.
Whenever the girls asked about Claire, I gave them the same honest, incomplete answer: “Your mother made a choice she thought she needed to make. I made a different one.”
I never called their mother a monster.
“Your mother made a choice.”
I told them the truth as gently as I could.
What I didn’t tell them was about the box.
***
For the first few years after Claire left, I sent letters.
Not for me. I understood fairly quickly that Claire had made a final decision and wasn’t in the business of reconsidering it.
I didn’t tell them about the box.
I sent them because someday, when the girls were old enough to have their own feelings about their mother, I didn’t want to be the thing standing between them.
So I wrote. School photos tucked into envelopes with a line or two about who the girls were becoming.
Report cards.
A note when Grace won a regional spelling bee at nine.
Another when Lily performed a violin solo at her fifth-grade concert and stood so still and focused that I had to press my hand to my mouth to keep from making noise.
