“Who wants more ham?”

That’s what I said. That’s apparently what I said at Easter dinner in 2017 while my granddaughter Mia sat next to me with bruises above both elbows and a grown man’s hand squeezing her arm under the table hard enough that she flinched.

I said, “Who wants more ham?” And I have been carrying that sentence in my body for seven years like a stone I swallowed and couldn’t pass.

I’m going to try to get through this without making myself sound better than I was. I don’t deserve that. I’ve had a lot of time to sit with this and I still can’t fully explain my own behavior, which is maybe the most honest thing I can say about it.

Mia is 24. She works for the county now, child protective services, makes $38,000 a year, drives a beat-up Honda, and has this way of looking at you when you’re talking that makes you feel like she already knows what you’re going to say before you say it. I don’t know when she got that look. I remember when she was seven and would run to me at the front door with her shoes on the wrong feet. I don’t know what happened in between. I mean, I do. That’s the problem. I do know.

I asked her to meet me at the coffee shop on Vine Street last Saturday. The one with the green awning, she knows the one, we’ve been there before for her birthdays. I got there twenty minutes early and I sat in the same chair I always sit in and I ordered a coffee I didn’t want and I kept rehearsing what I was going to say. I had it written down on a notepad at home.

I practiced it in the car. By the time she walked in and hugged me and sat down across from me, every single word I had prepared left my head completely.

She looked good. Tired, but good. She had her work badge clipped to her jacket even though it was Saturday. I think she does that without noticing. She ordered tea, the kind you have to let steep, and she wrapped both hands around the cup, and I thought: she does that the same way I do. And then I thought about Easter and I almost didn’t say anything. I almost just asked about her job and her apartment and whether she was eating enough. I almost did that.

I said, “I need to tell you something I should have told you seven years ago.”

She put her cup down and looked at me. Not surprised. Not bracing herself. Just quiet and steady in that way she has.

I said, “Easter. 2017. I saw the bruises on your arms.”

She said, “I know you saw, Grandma. I watched you look at them.”