“Sweetheart, I’m your grandma. We shouldn’t have secrets from each other, right?”
She chewed her lip.
Then, very quietly: “That’s Aunt Vanessa.”
My stomach dropped like an elevator with a cut cable.
“Mommy asked me not to tell you about her.”
I sat down hard.
Vanessa. I hadn’t said that name out loud in years. And thinking of HER being around my granddaughter… what was Laura thinking?
I wanted to ask a hundred things. I asked the one I needed.
“You’ve met her, Dori?”
“Uh-huh.”
“More than once?”
I hadn’t said that name out loud in years.
“Lots of times. She’s funny. She knows I love drawing, so she gave me this.” She held up the black pencil case I’d noticed all month. “And Mommy likes having her sister back.”
Having her sister back.
This wasn’t one accidental meeting.
Laura and Vanessa had rebuilt something without me.
Vanessa had done something terrible years ago, a betrayal so vile that I’d cut her off completely.
