POV: Jasmine
Asher had let himself in while I was at the door with the delivery man.
He had a key. He had had a key for a long time. He had not used it in months because Liam had been alive and had answered the door himself.
He was already in the kitchen when I turned around with the box. Standing at the counter in his coat, his cast still on, watching me cross the apartment with the box in my arms and the small white envelope in my fingers.
He looked at the box, then at the card. "What is that?"
I put the box on the table. "Read it."
He read it. His face did the thing his face did when he was doing the calculation before he was willing to say it out loud.
Premeditated. Public. Performative.
He set the card down on the table. "He is moving."
I sat down. "Already."
The handwriting was beautiful. Even strokes, slow letters, the kind of hand a man cultivated over years to look like a hand formed by a different century.
Your grandfather is thinking of you.
It was not a card to a granddaughter. It was a documented entry in a record. He had written grandfather. He had written Grandpa Jackson. He had used Aurora's name as a filing key.
Liam was dead.
Liam had been dead for less than a week. His firstborn son. The man Jackson had buried four pews behind us in a dark suit that had not needed to be bought.
And here was Jackson, on a Wednesday, sending his granddaughter an expensive box.
Something in my chest, which had been held in a careful box of its own since the corridor, came open.
I stood up.
I do not remember the sequence. I remember the sound. The card went onto the floor. The water glass went onto the floor. The fruit bowl went onto the floor.
I picked up the box with both hands and threw it. Something inside it cracked when it hit the wall. Brightly wrapped things spilled across the kitchen tiles in a scatter of ribbon and tissue.
"Liam is dead," I heard myself say, and my voice was lower than the voice I had been using in the corridor, something that came from somewhere in my body that had been waiting since the salon. "Liam is dead, and this man is sending his daughter gifts. He buried his son four pews behind me. He is still running his play."
Asher did not move from the counter. "I know."
"He is still running his play, Asher." My hands were shaking. The shaking was new — a thing my body had not been doing in front of anyone, and it was doing it now, and I could not stop it.
A small voice came from the hall.
"Mama?" Aurora was in the doorway in her pyjamas. The rabbit was in her hand. Her eyes were huge and wet and locked on the floor. "My presents."
She went past me at a run. She knelt down on the kitchen tiles in the middle of the wreckage.
She picked up a small stuffed thing with a torn ear and pressed it against her chest.
"Mama, don't break them," she said, looking up at me with the kind of fear a child should not have to carry in her own kitchen. "Don't break them."
The rage went out of me the way a fire went out when somebody opened a window onto it.
What replaced it was worse.
Shame — the specific, mother shame, the kind that arrived already telling you what you had done and what your child was going to remember about you for the rest of her life.
She is on the floor at four years old picking up scattered toys her dead father's father sent her, and her mother is the reason they are scattered, and she is going to remember this.
I started crying.
I did not make it dignified. I stood in the middle of my own kitchen with a hand over my mouth and water running off my face and watched my child gather objects she had attached to before she had been allowed to.
Finn was already moving.
I had not seen him come in. He crossed the floor in three steps and bent and lifted Aurora off the tiles with the small thing still clutched against her chest.
He did not say anything to me.
He spoke only to her. The same voice he had used through her door. He turned with her in his arms and walked out of the kitchen, and as he went I heard the words —
"We are going to take these to your room, baby, all of them, we will sort them, you can keep the ones you want, no one is going to take any of them away from you, I have you" — and he sounded like a man who had decided, on no notice at all, to be a steady, available adult to a four-year-old.
Asher's hands came down on my shoulders from behind.
He did not turn me around. He stood at my back, and he placed both hands flat against the tops of my shoulders, and he held me there.
The cast on his right hand was awkward against me, and he had compensated by adjusting the angle.
He was holding me down. Not hard. Just steady. The way you held a horse that was about to bolt.
"Breathe," he said behind me, quiet.
I tried and failed. "I — I —"
"In," he said, his voice low and even. "Slowly out."
I gripped the edge of the counter. "Asher —"
"In," he repeated, and his hands pressed a fraction firmer. "I am not letting go. Out."
I did what he told me to do. The body had nothing else left. I let his hands hold the top of me in place, and I let the shaking move through me underneath them, and I did not turn around.
He knew not to turn me. He knew I could not have my face seen yet. How does he always know.
The breath came back. Uneven. Then a little more even. Then more.
He did not let go until my breathing had matched his own.
When he did let go, it was one hand at a time, the way you let go of something you were not sure was stable yet.
A small set of footsteps came down the hall.
Aurora was in the doorway. Her face was clean. Her eyes were still wet at the edges. She was holding Mister — the small white rabbit from Italy, the one she had carried for two days through the town.
She walked across the kitchen. She did not look at the scattered toys on the floor. She stopped at the table.
She put the rabbit very carefully next to me, with his small head propped against my arm.
"It will helps, Mamma," she said, and her voice was so steady and so small that the grammar mistake was the thing that broke me again.
She turned. She walked back down the hall to her room.