Chapter 3: What a Seven-Year-Old Keeps Secret
Nolan stood up slowly.
He did not look at Dana.
He kept his eyes on Lily and held out his hand.
"Come on, sweetheart.
Let's go get you some water."
Lily took his hand.
Her fingers were cold.
In the kitchen, he filled a glass and set it on the table in front of her.
She wrapped both hands around it and stared down at the surface of the water.
"Lily." He pulled a chair close and sat so they were at the same level.
"You're not in trouble.
Not even a little bit.
I just need you to talk to me."
She looked up.
Her eyes moved to the doorway.
"She's upstairs," he said.
"It's just us."
A long pause.
Then, very quietly: "She said if I told you, you wouldn't believe me anyway."
Something cold moved through his chest.
"She said that?"
Lily nodded.
"How many times has this happened?"
She thought about it the way children do when they are counting something they have been trying to forget.
"A lot.
When you go on trips."
"Does she use her hand?"
Lily's eyes dropped back to the glass.
That was answer enough.
"Has she ever done anything else?
Anything that hurt you in a different way?"
"She locks me in my room sometimes.
When I cry too loud." Lily's voice was very small.
"She says crying is for babies and I embarrass her."
Nolan set his hand flat on the table.
He did not trust himself to speak for a moment.
"Last week," Lily continued, as if now that the door was open she could not close it again, "I spilled my juice at breakfast and she grabbed my arm really hard and said if I did it again she'd send me away.
To Grandma's.
Except she said it mean.
Like Grandma's was a punishment."
"Okay." He kept his voice even.
"Okay, sweetheart."
"Are you going to make her stop?"
"Yes."
"Promise?"
"I promise."
She studied him for a moment with the particular seriousness of a child deciding whether an adult can be trusted.
Then she nodded once and picked up her glass.
Nolan sat with her while she drank.
He listened to the sound of Dana moving upstairs — the deliberate footsteps, the slow creak of the floorboard near the bedroom door — and he thought about the nine years he had been married to a woman he apparently had not known at all.
He pulled out his phone and opened the voice memo app.
He set it on the table face-down, recording, and called up to the stairs.
"Dana.
Can you come down, please?"
The footsteps paused.
Then they started toward the stairs.
He looked at Lily.
"Go watch TV in the living room.
Keep the volume up, okay?"
She slipped off the chair without a word and disappeared around the corner.
A moment later the television came on.
Dana appeared in the kitchen doorway.
She had changed her blouse.
Her expression was composed, almost pleasant, the way it always was when she had decided on a strategy.
"I thought we should talk," she said.
"We should," Nolan agreed.
"Sit down."
She sat across from him and folded her hands on the table.
"I know what you're thinking.
But you only heard one side of it."
"Tell me the other side."
"Lily is a difficult child, Nolan.
You're away most of the month.
You don't see what I deal with.
She throws tantrums, she breaks things deliberately, she lies.
The vase wasn't an accident.
She looked right at me and pushed it off the shelf."
"And your response to that was to sl@p her across the face."
Dana's chin lifted slightly.
"I did not sl@p her.
I gave her a firm correction on the cheek.
There is a difference."
"There is no difference."
"Every parent disciplines differently.
You can't—"
"She's been locked in her room.
She's been told she'll be sent away.
She's been grabbed hard enough to leave a mark." He watched Dana's face.
"How long?"
A flicker.
Just one.
Then the composure returned.
"You're being dramatic.
Children exaggerate."
"She wasn't exaggerating.
I know what exaggerating looks like.
That's not what I saw upstairs."
Dana leaned back in her chair.
"So you come home four days early, spend ten minutes with a seven-year-old, and now you've decided you know everything."
"I decided I knew enough when I heard her begging you to stop from the bottom of the stairs."
The kitchen went quiet.
Dana looked at him for a long moment.
Then she said, very calmly: "You should be careful, Nolan.
Accusations like this can go in a lot of directions."
He held her gaze.
"Yes," he said.
May you like
"They can."
His phone sat face-down on the table between them, the small red recording light hidden against the wood.
