Chapter 1 - The Photograph Inside the Envelope
Emma destroyed Noah’s birthday cake before anyone finished singing.
My niece plunged both hands into the top tier of the superhero cake, ripped out the plastic figures, and crushed blue frosting between her fingers.
“Nobody cares about your stupid birthday!”
Then she flung a fistful of icing across my seven-year-old son’s face.
Noah stumbled backward crying.
I rushed between them and pulled him behind me.
“Ashley, get Emma away from the cake.”
My younger sister did the opposite.
Ashley shoved the ruined cake tray aside and stepped in front of Emma as though my niece were the one who needed protecting.
“If your son can’t take a joke, that’s his problem.”
It was a sunny June afternoon in my backyard in Fairfield, Connecticut. Balloons were tied to the fence. Twenty relatives had watched the whole thing. Nobody laughed.
I reached for my phone.
For eighteen months, I had paid for Emma’s dance classes because Ashley said money was tight after her divorce. I had also paid the deposit on a summer dance camp and part of a December ski trip to Vermont.
I canceled both remaining payments.
Ashley grabbed my wrist.
“You don’t punish my daughter because your kid cries too easily.”
“Then you can pay for her.”
Her face changed.
She shoved Emma’s unopened birthday-gift iPad box against my chest.
“You promised her.”
“And you promised you’d stop excusing this behavior.”
The side gate clicked.
Our mail carrier stepped into the yard holding a certified envelope he had already tried to deliver twice that week.
Ashley saw the return address.
She went pale.
That caught my attention more than the destroyed cake.
I signed for the envelope.
“Ashley,” I said, “why are you afraid of this?”
She lunged for it.
I tore it open first.
Inside was a letter from an insurance company and a color photograph taken six weeks earlier, moments after the bicycle accident that fractured Noah’s wrist and left him with a concussion.
His blue bike lay twisted beside a stone mailbox.
Next to it was a purple bicycle I recognized immediately.
Emma’s.
A child’s arm appeared at the edge of the photograph.
Around the wrist was the rainbow-beaded bracelet Emma had worn every day since Christmas.
Ashley had told me Emma wasn’t there that afternoon.
May you like
I slowly looked from the photograph to my niece.
Emma stopped smirking.
