“I need to get something.”
She walked outside.
A few minutes later, she returned carrying a large box.
I recognized the handwriting on the lid immediately.
“For my family. Open on their first birthday.”
Daniel.
My hands went still.
Carol set the box on the table between the paper plates.
“He gave me this the week he stopped driving,” she said. “He made me swear not to hand it over one day early.”
“What is this?”
“Something he prepared.”
I reached for the latch, but Carol put her hand flat on the lid.
“Before you open it, there’s something in there he told me you’d want to be sitting down for.”
Something in her face stopped me.
Guilt.
“Carol?”
She lowered herself into a chair.
“Sit down, Bianca.”
I did.
Then she told me.
Daniel had known.
He’d had scans done that February.
He already had the results in the glove compartment the day I found him sitting in the car with papers on his lap.
