Chapter 5 - The Questions I Answered a Thousand Times
Dean tipped his head toward Nolan. "He helped."
My head snapped around. "The deal."
Nolan nodded. "Part of it."
"Part?"
Before he could get another word out, Delaney's footsteps came fast across the grass.
She saw Dean first. "Dean?"
Then her eyes moved past him to the vanity, and the cheesecake tilted so far in her hands I thought it was going in the dirt.
She walked up to it slowly. "No."
Dean didn't move.
She set the cake down on the patio table without looking at it and reached for the small top drawer, resting two fingers on the little brass pull.
I looked from Dean to Nolan and back. "One of you is going to tell me what this deal was. Now."
Dean looked at our daughter, then at me, and let out a breath.
"Nolan's job was to tell me when Laney stopped checking every photo of herself. Mine was to have this ready if that day ever showed up." He glanced at Nolan. "Then tonight he decided on his own that you needed a job too."
Nolan shrugged. "I had to get you out of the house somehow."
"My job to do what?" I said.
Dean held my eyes. "To see what Laney doesn't need from you anymore."
Delaney had her hand flat on the mirror now. "Dean. Why do you have this?"
He touched the edge of the frame. "You told me you didn't want it in your room, Laney. You never once told me to throw it out."
She stared at him.
"Here's where the deal comes in," Nolan said quietly.
I turned on him. "Talk."
So he did.
Months back, before he proposed, Nolan had gone to Dean. Not for permission — he was smart enough not to call it that.
"I told him Laney doesn't need my blessing to do anything," Dean said. "We just talked."
And Dean had asked him one question. What do you love most about her face?
"I couldn't answer it," Nolan admitted. "Not without cutting her into pieces, and I wasn't going to do that."
So instead Dean told him about the habit. About every camera, every holiday, every group photo for the last fifteen years.
Is it okay? Can I see it first? Delete that one.
Dean looked at me. "You remember."
Of course I remembered. I'd been the one answering those questions. Hundreds of times. Thousands. Yes, sweetheart, it's fine. Yes, you can see it. Yes, you look beautiful.
"I told Nolan not to jump in and reassure her before she'd even asked for it," Dean said. "Just love her like a normal person and see what happened."
Nolan picked it up. "And he said if she ever stopped asking about the pictures — just stopped — I should tell him."
Delaney's mouth fell open. "You two have been keeping track of my selfies?"
"That sounds so much worse out loud," Nolan said. "About two months ago, you stopped asking. You just… stopped."
He held up his phone. The lock screen was a parking-lot photo — Delaney mid-laugh, hair everywhere, eyes crinkled shut, the birthmark in full view and nobody in the frame caring.
And I heard myself start to say it before I even knew it was coming.
"You usually hate pictures where the light hits your —"
I stopped.
Too late. Delaney had heard it. So had Dean.
That was my part.
"Colleen," Dean said, careful now, "half the time Laney walks into a room perfectly fine, and you're already scanning it. Looking for who's looking at her."
"I was protecting her."
"I know you were." His voice dropped and softened. "But sometimes you remind her to be scared before a single person in that room has done anything wrong."
I thought about all the times a phone had come up at a birthday party and my mouth had opened on its own. Laney, the light's better over here. Turn your head a little, sweetheart. You look beautiful — like she needed the sentence as armor before anybody had even swung.
Delaney was looking right at me.
"I think I spent so many years watching the room for you," I said, and my throat closed halfway through it, "that I didn't notice you might not need me doing it anymore."
She reached over and took my hand. "You were trying to help, Mom."
"I'm trying to learn how to tell when you're not asking me to."
Dean tapped the top of the vanity. "Which is the whole reason for this thing. I didn't fix it up because I think Laney needs to sit and look at herself and feel different about it. I fixed it up because I was hoping that someday it could just go back to being furniture."
Delaney looked at the mirror for a long moment.
"If you want it back in the garage, that's where it goes," Dean said. "No feelings attached. Your call."
Nobody said anything.
Then Delaney pulled out the little bench, sat down, and looked at her own reflection in the chipped glass.
Nolan waited. Dean waited.
I opened my mouth — you look beautiful — and shut it again.
Delaney leaned in closer to the mirror.
"Oh my God."
My oldest reflex fired straight out of me. "What? What is it?"
She jabbed a finger at her hairline. "Is that a gray hair?"
Nolan laughed.
Which was a mistake.
She spun on the bench. "You knew?"
"Laney, statistically there might be more than —"
"Finish that sentence and there is no wedding."
Dean started laughing so hard he had to put a hand on the shed.
And I felt something in my chest that had been clenched for about fifteen years finally let go a little.
May you like
Her birthmark was right there in the mirror, in the porch light, plain as anything.
And for once it wasn't the first thing any of us needed to say something about.
