I got down on my knees right there on the little bathroom rug so I’d be at her level. I said her name. And that’s when she finally turned around and looked at me for real, not in the mirror anymore.

“I just need to know one thing,” she said.

I told her okay.

She took a little breath. The kind a kid takes when they’ve been holding a question inside for a long, long time.

“Do you not love me because of something I did?”

I started to say no, baby, you never did one single thing, but she wasn’t finished yet. She wasn’t done.

“Or is it because I look too much like Mom?”

And there it was. Eleven years old. She had figured out the very thing I had never once let myself say out loud, not even alone in the dark. Because she did look like Anna. Same dark hair. Same way of going quiet and small when the room got loud. And every time I looked at that child, I saw the woman my Ray still cried for at night when he thought I was asleep. The woman I knew, deep down where I kept the ugly things, he’d never stop loving more than he loved me. And I had been making a little girl pay for all of that since the day I first walked through that door.

I didn’t answer her. God forgive me, I didn’t say one word. I just pulled her in and hugged her, and she let me, and she patted my back real soft, like I was the one who needed comforting. She was eleven years old and she was comforting me.

Lily’s all grown now. Got her own little ones. She’s polite to me on the phone, sends a Christmas card, that kind of thing.

Careful. The way you are with somebody you’ve made your peace with but never your home. She has never asked me that question again.

And I sit here and I still can’t decide which is worse. That a baby ever had to ask it at all.

Or that after all these years, I’ve still never been brave enough to tell her the answer was yes.