Chapter 3 - The Red Velvet Box
That night, around nine, I went looking for Ellie and found her alone on the edge of the guest bed with the candle in her lap. Her dress was creased from a whole day of pretending three words hadn't landed on her. She wasn't crying. She was just looking at that tag with the flat, focused stare kids get when they're trying to do the math on something an adult did to them.
I sat down next to her. Before I could find a single useful word, she asked the exact question I'd been dreading since breakfast.
"Mom." She didn't look up. "Am I only Dad's girl?"
I opened my mouth. Nothing came.
Derek walked in behind me. He crossed the room, got down on his knees so his eyes were level with hers, and took both her hands.
"You are my daughter," he said. "There is no tag in this house, and no card, and nobody's handwriting that gets to change that. Ever."
She studied him for a long moment.
He reached into the pink overnight bag by the desk and came out with a small red velvet box. He set it in her palms. It was small enough that her fingers closed all the way around it.
"If Grandma ever makes you feel invisible again," he said, "you decide whether she gets this. Not me. Not your mom. You."
That stopped me cold. He wasn't asking a seven-year-old to fight his battle. He'd already drawn the line himself. He was just handing her the last word on whether to enforce it.
Ellie turned the box over. "Is she going to be mad at us?"
"Probably. Really mad."
Her voice dropped to almost nothing. "Are you still going to be my dad if she's mad?"
For one second Derek's face just came apart. It wasn't that he didn't know the answer. It was that his mother had managed to plant that question in a little kid at all.
May you like
"Always," he said. "No matter what."
She tucked the box away. Nothing else happened that night. No shouting in the hallway, no scene. Diane went to bed sure her little candle stunt had been swept under the rug like everything else.
