I looked at the one in my hand.
“You asked him.”
“I did.”
“What did he say?”
“That it was none of my business.”
A laugh broke out of me, raw and humorless. “That fool.”
Elise’s eyes filled. “I thought about it all the way home.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
There it was.
The question she had been avoiding for a year.
She bowed her head.
“I came to your house,” she said, “and you were asleep on the couch. You had that green blanket over you, the one Grandma made. There was a bowl on the floor because you couldn’t make it to the bathroom fast enough.”
I remembered the blanket. I remembered none of the rest.
“You woke up and asked me if I’d seen him. And you looked…” Her voice failed. She pressed her lips together, forcing control back into it. “You looked like if I gave you one reason to get out of that bed, you would have crawled to him.”
