Chapter 3 - What Delphine WantedI want to be careful here, because grief does strange, ugly things to people, and I do not think Delphine Voss set out to be cruel.
I think she was drowning. Callum's support had always been inconsistent, and after Elsie died, it became something else — erratic in a new direction, generous in bursts followed by long silences, tangled up in whatever complicated, unprocessed grief he was carrying for a daughter he'd apparently loved deeply and a life he'd been unwilling to give up in order to be honest about any of it.
At some point — the exact timeline remains murky, and I suspect it always will — Delphine noticed the resemblance. Junie had always looked something like Elsie, the way half-siblings sometimes do, but grief and guilt and a father who kept saying, distractedly, unforgivably, "you look just like your sister today," apparently taught an eleven-year-old girl exactly which name made her father's face soften and exactly which one made him look away.
Delphine, according to her own statement, began encouraging it. Not out of malice, she insisted, but out of a kind of desperate, practical calculation: Callum paid more, called more, showed up more, when Junie let him call her Elsie. When he asked her to say "Mommy" on a phone call to a woman he still hadn't told her existed. When he treated his daughter, in small and devastating ways, like a chance to keep a door open that should have stayed closed the day our real daughter died.
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The school ended up in it by accident, not design. Delphine had lost the lease on the flat she'd been renting — the crooked-mailbox house four streets from mine had, in fact, been condemned as unsafe for habitation three weeks earlier, something the housing authority confirmed within days of my first conversation with Priya Ramaswamy. Junie had been staying, in the interim, in Delphine's car some nights, and at a friend's crowded flat other nights, and had walked into school that Thursday cold, hungry, and finally, after months of confusion about which name and which mother belonged to which version of her life, simply asked to call somebody.
She gave the school my number because it was the number she'd memorized. Because Callum had made her memorize it, months earlier, "just in case," he'd said, without ever explaining in case of what.
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