Emma’s safe. That’s the promise. That’s the whole thing.
It cost me two hundred and eighty thousand dollars, seven years, a wife, and a daughter, and a seven-year-old had to ride a bicycle eleven miles and then wait six months for me to pay attention.
But she’s safe, and she’s upstairs right now, and she asks me hard questions in the park on Saturdays, and I put the coffee down every time.
Now I want to hear from you.
Here’s the one that keeps me up. Six months before the oak tree, my granddaughter asked me in the car if she could come live at my house. She made it sound like a sleepover, because she was seven and she was giving me an easy way to say yes. And I laughed and told her her dad would miss her too much, and she had to carry the truth alone for six more months and then figure out a harder way to ask. Was that an honest mistake any loving grandfather would make — or was that a man who didn’t want to find out, the same way I didn’t want to find out when my daughter sat on a stool in my store and asked me how bad debt has to be before it’s bad?
