Neither truth canceled the other.
Dad apologized properly.
Not with excuses.
Not with “but.”
He told me he should have trusted me with the truth.
I accepted his apology.
Not as though the past disappeared.
But because apologies from people you love are sometimes less about closing a door than opening a different one.
Emily’s birthday falls eleven days after Lily’s.
Every year, we visit her grave.
Not with the same unbearable grief anymore.
Now it is acknowledgment.
A way of making space for someone who is not physically present.
That year, Lily brought lilies.
She also brought a bunch of wild flowers.
“Emily wouldn’t have wanted anything too perfect,” she said.
She was right.
Carl came with us.
The three of us stood together beneath the trees.
No one spoke for a while.
Then Lily remembered one of the tree-climbing stories I had told her.
She laughed.
