Lily shrugged. “It’s okay. The other girl cries louder.”
My blood chilled.
Nathan set his mug down too hard. Coffee spilled over the rim.
“What other girl?” he asked.
Lily looked at him as though the question confused her.
“The one near my bookshelf.”
No one moved.
“What girl near your bookshelf?” I asked carefully.
Lily pointed down the hallway toward her room.
“She doesn’t stand there when the light is bright. Only when it’s gold.”
Her nightlight.
Eleanor grabbed the counter.
Nathan’s face went white with anger, but not at Lily. At the air. At the past. At whatever part of him wanted to deny what we were hearing.
“Lily,” he said gently, though his voice shook, “did Grandma tell you about a girl?”
“No.”
“Did you hear the name Rosie from Grandma?”
Lily shook her head. “The girl said it.”
Eleanor made a soft sound, almost a sob.
I sat down on the floor because my knees had stopped trusting me.
Lily leaned closer and whispered, “She says Grandma forgot the song.”
That was when Eleanor broke.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. She folded into the nearest chair and wept with a grief so deep it seemed to empty her of years. Lily, frightened now, ran to me and climbed into my lap.
Nathan stood frozen.
“What song?” I asked.
Eleanor tried to answer, but couldn’t.
Nathan did.
“There was a lullaby,” he said. “Mom used to sing it to Rosie.”
Eleanor shook her head fiercely. “I stopped after the funeral.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it was the last thing I sang to her,” she whispered.
That afternoon, Lily drew a picture.
I had asked her to draw her room, hoping to understand what she thought she saw. Children reveal more with crayons than with questions.
She drew her bed first, big and purple. Then herself, a small stick figure under a pink blanket. Then Eleanor, lying beside her with gray hair and a long blue nightgown.
In the corner, near the bookshelf, she drew another child.
A girl in a yellow dress.
Dark hair.
Small hands.
No smile.
Above the figure, in uneven purple letters, Lily wrote:
ROSIE.
Nathan stared at the paper for a long time.
Then he left the room.
I found him in the garage twenty minutes later, pulling boxes down from the highest shelf. Dust rained over his shoulders.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
