And here’s what my mind did with it, and I’m not proud of this.
I thought I finally understood. Daniel knew I was a mother once. He’d seen what happened to my child.
You still have no idea why he chose you.
Maybe he’d looked at a broken woman with an empty space where a daughter used to be and thought, There. That’s who can fill it.
The memories I had of Daniel began to feel different. I no longer knew how much of what I had seen in him was love and how much had been guilt. I hated him a little bit more.
“I think I finally get why your dad chose me,” I said, mostly to myself.
“But he didn’t. That’s what’s weird.”
I hated him a little bit more.
I looked down at her. “What?”
“Dad didn’t choose you.” She said it so plainly. “I did.”
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“Lily, sweetheart, I don’t understand.”
She picked at the hem of her sleeve. “It was before you got married. Before Dad even liked you like that. You’d been doing my hair a lot. You sat with me when Dad was too tired. So one night I asked him something.”
“Dad didn’t choose you.”
She glanced up. “I said, ‘Daddy, is this what having a mommy is like?'”
I can’t tell you what those words did to me.
“He asked me what I meant. And I said you knew how I liked my hair. You remembered stuff I told you. You helped when I got scared, and you made sure I had what I needed.” She shrugged, a tiny six-year-old shrug. “And you stayed. You always stayed.”
“What did he say?”
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I can’t tell you what those words did to me.
“He asked how I felt about you. And I said I wanted you to keep staying.” She looked straight at me. “I told Dad I wanted you. And he said he wanted you too.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
Something in me loosened.
I had been afraid that Daniel saw a grieving mother and chose me to fill an empty place in Lily’s life.
Something in me loosened.
But Lily had begun choosing me before any of those pieces came together, and I had begun loving her the same way.
Daniel’s secret ran alongside all of it. It never made any of it.
I didn’t forgive Daniel in that kitchen. He had kept Mr. Bunny for years, married me without telling me the truth, and left his daughter to deliver it after he died.
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But I no longer had to wonder whether Lily had been handed to me like a consolation prize.
I didn’t forgive Daniel in that kitchen.
She chose me first. And I chose her, every ordinary day after, with every braid.
We sat on the kitchen floor for a long time. The soup went cold.
Eventually Lily reached out and touched the rabbit’s crooked ear.
“Who does he belong to?”
