“He said he doesn’t date women with kids, okay? He was real upfront about it.” Her voice got that defensive thing it gets. “It’s still new. I didn’t want to scare him off. I’ll tell him, I just need the right time.”

“The right time,” I said. “And in the meantime you’re locking a four-year-old in a closet.”

“I’m not locking her in there, God, Mom, you make it sound like I’m a monster. The door’s not even locked. She watches her tablet. It’s like an hour, maybe two.”

An hour. Maybe two. Like that made it better. I had to sit down on the edge of my bed because honestly my legs weren’t doing so good. This is my baby girl I’m talking to. I raised her better than this. Or I thought I did. I keep going back over it, wondering what I missed, what I did or didn’t do that made her think this was something a person could even consider.

And here’s the part I left out, the part that did me in. While I was on the phone, I didn’t realize Lily had wandered down the hall. She was standing in my bedroom doorway the whole time, listening, with her bunny under her arm. And when I hung up she walked over real slow and she put her little hand on my knee.

“Nana,” she whispered, “am I why Mommy’s friend will leave?”

I told her no, baby, no, none of this is your fault, not one bit of it. But she wasn’t done. She had this look on her face, this worried grown-up look that no four-year-old should ever have to wear, and she kept going.

“Because last time, when I was being real quiet, I heard him tell Mommy something.”

I asked her, gentle as I could, what did he say, honey.

She looked down at her bunny. “He said if he ever found out she was hiding a kid from him, he would make her get rid of me.

He said pick. Him or the kid.” And then she looked up at me with these big eyes and asked, “Nana, what does get rid of me mean?”

I don’t think I breathed for a second. I just pulled her into my lap and held her and told her it didn’t mean anything, that she was the most loved little girl in the whole world, that nobody was getting rid of anybody. And the whole time I’m holding her I’m thinking about my Rachel sitting on that couch, listening to a man say pick, him or the kid, and choosing to put her daughter in a closet instead of putting that man out the front door.

That was the part that finished me. Not the closet. The choosing.