Chapter 5
I confronted Mark alone.
No Claudia.
No staff.
No audience.
“Did you ask Ethan to call her Mom?”
He looked exhausted.
“Claudia thought it would help.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“How did Ethan respond?”
“He cried.”
“And?”
“He said Mommy was dead.”
Three years old.
Clearer than all of them.
“What did you tell him?”
Mark’s eyes filled.
“That Claudia would take care of him now.”
Not wrong.
Potentially.
Then:
“And that he needed to stop making her feel like an outsider.”
There.
A toddler given responsibility for an adult woman’s insecurity.
I stared at my son.
“Do you hear yourself?”
He looked down.
“She said the house would never feel like ours if Elise stayed everywhere.”
“Ours.”
“Yes.”
“You mean yours and Claudia’s.”
Silence.
Not Ethan’s.
That was the point.
Claudia had built a new household emotionally, and Ethan was the last person who made the old one visible.
He had Elise’s eyes.
Elise’s photographs.
Elise’s toy train.
Elise’s room.
May you like
Elise’s name.
He was three years old and already inconvenient evidence.
