She stopped outside the gate. That was typical of Clara. She rarely entered any space without first checking whether someone might resent her presence.
She wore a white cover-up over her swimsuit and held a carefully wrapped gift beneath one arm.
“You’re late,” my father called from the lawn.
Clara smiled.
She offered no explanation. She never did.
Fifteen years earlier, she had married my father two years after my mother died. I had been 17, furious with the world and especially with any woman who dared stand in my mother’s kitchen.
Clara never argued back.
She simply learned to be cautious.
She never sat in Mom’s chair.
She left the curtains untouched.
She asked permission before handling anything in the house, even after living there for years.
Back then, I mistook her caution for emotional distance.
Eventually, distance became the language our family spoke.
Still, she had come to Ariel’s birthday.
