Chapter 2 - The Move They Had Decided Clara Couldn't Make
Clara did not stay for an explanation.
She strapped Gigi into her car seat, drove out of Upper Arlington, and called her closest friend from a grocery-store parking lot.
“Can we stay with you tonight?”
Sarah Morgan did not ask why.
“Come over.”
That simple answer nearly made Clara cry.
For the last eleven months, nearly every offer of help had come with questions.
Her husband, Matt, had died from a sudden cardiac arrhythmia when Gigi was fourteen months old.
After the funeral, Clara had moved temporarily into Richard’s house because she could not manage grief, daycare, work, and an empty home all at once.
Richard loved Gigi.
He picked her up from daycare twice a week.
He kept applesauce pouches in his car.
He knew which stuffed rabbit had to be in the crib before bedtime.
Arthur lived fifteen minutes away and came over constantly.
At first, Clara had been grateful.
She had said things she now regretted.
I don’t know how I’d survive without you guys.
I can’t make one more decision today.
Can Dad just handle daycare this week?
Those sentences had described grief.
Arthur had apparently treated them as evidence.
By late winter, Clara had begun rebuilding.
She returned to full-time work.
She started counseling.
She paid off the last of Matt’s hospital bills.
Then a former supervisor offered her a job at a pediatric rehabilitation center in Oak Park, Illinois.
Better pay.
A predictable schedule.
A daycare three blocks from the clinic.
A small apartment she could afford without Richard’s help.
Clara said yes.
Arthur reacted as though she had announced she was taking Gigi to another continent.
“You don’t know anybody there.”
“I know three people at the clinic.”
“Gigi knows us.”
“She’ll still know you.”
“Kids need stability.”
“She has stability.”
Arthur looked at her then with the same expression he had used over the behavior folder.
As though he knew something Clara did not.
She had ignored it.
At Sarah’s house, Gigi fell asleep on the couch with frosting still caught in one curl.
Clara sat at the kitchen island and called Richard.
He answered immediately.
“Please come back.”
“No.”
“Arthur went too far.”
“Arthur had a guardianship petition.”
“It’s a draft.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
Richard exhaled.
“No one filed anything.”
“Who prepared it?”
Silence.
“Dad.”
“We talked to an attorney.”
Clara closed her eyes.
“We?”
“Arthur and I.”
“When?”
“March.”
Two months earlier.
Before Clara had formally accepted the Chicago job.
“What did you tell the attorney?”
“That we were concerned.”
“About what?”
Richard hesitated.
“The move. Your stress. Gigi’s behavior.”
“My daughter is two.”
“She’s had a hard year.”
“She lost her father.”
“So did you.”
Clara felt the insult beneath the sympathy.
“You’re using my husband’s death to argue I’m an unfit mother?”
“I didn’t say unfit.”
“That is exactly what you have to argue if you want guardianship over a living parent’s objection.”
Richard said nothing.
Clara had worked in pediatric healthcare long enough to know that family concern was not legal magic.
Parents did not lose children because grandparents disliked a relocation.
“What was in the petition?”
“Arthur drafted most of the factual section.”
“Based on that folder?”
“Yes.”
Clara looked at Gigi sleeping.
“Did you know he was keeping it?”
Richard did not answer quickly enough.
“Dad.”
“Yes.”
Clara felt something inside her harden.
Then Richard added:
“But I did not know he was creating incidents.”
Clara sat straighter.
“What does that mean?”
“The cupcake.”
Richard sounded sick.
“I thought he was recording things that happened naturally.”
Clara closed her eyes.
Her brother had just deliberately frightened a toddler to manufacture one more entry.
And her father’s defense was that he thought the rest were real.
That distinction did not comfort her.
May you like
It gave her a new question.
How many of Arthur’s other notes had been created the same way?
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