Chương 13
She stopped trying to predict them.
Robert asked whether she felt like she had won.
They were in her kitchen.
Noah sat in a high chair chewing a silicone spoon.
Eli had thrown his on the floor.
Emma picked it up.
“No.”
Robert nodded.
“Good answer.”
“What does winning look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither.”
He bent to retrieve the spoon after Eli threw it again.
“Maybe this.”
“Picking things off the floor?”
“Apparently that’s ninety percent of grandparenting.”
Emma smiled.
Robert straightened.
Then his expression changed.
“I owe Daniel an apology.”
Emma stared at him.
“For the slap.”
“You already apologized to me.”
“Not him.”
“No.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I know.”
Robert gave her a look.
“Stop saying that.”
She laughed.
A week later, at a custody handoff, Robert told Daniel.
It took eleven seconds.
“I should not have hit you. What you did doesn’t make that okay.”
Daniel looked startled.
Then suspicious.
Then tired.
“Okay.”
Robert waited.
“That’s it?”
Daniel said, “What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then okay.”
Robert grumbled about it for an hour afterward.
Emma thought her mother would have found that funny.
Spring came.
The twins learned to sit.
Then crawl.
Emma went back to work three days a week at first.
On her first morning, she stood in the office parking lot for ten minutes because leaving the boys with childcare felt impossible.
Not because she believed someone was filming them.
Because she was their mother and they were small and she had spent months building her life around their breathing.
She nearly drove home.
Instead she went inside.
At lunch, she checked the childcare app six times.
By the end of the month, she checked twice.
Daniel remained part of the boys’ lives.
That was not simple.
Nothing about him was simple anymore.
He could make Eli laugh harder than anyone.
He could also send Emma into sudden silence by casually moving a phone on a table so its camera faced her.
The first time it happened, he noticed her reaction.
He turned the phone face down.
“I’m sorry.”
She said, “You don’t have to apologize every time.”
“I probably do.”
“No. You have to notice.”
He nodded.
That distinction became one of the few things they were good at.
They did not reconcile.
At least not in the way people meant when they used the word.
They became more competent at being separated.
They discussed daycare.
Vaccinations.
Sleep schedules.
The mysterious disappearance of socks.
They argued about whether the boys needed shoes before they could walk.
Daniel said no.
Emma bought shoes anyway.
Robert bought louder shoes.
Life accumulated around the wound.
One afternoon near the twins’ first birthday, Monica called.
“The mirror can be released.”
Emma was standing in a grocery store comparing two brands of pasta sauce.
For a moment she did not understand.
“The device.”
“Oh.”
“The evidentiary hold is finished. You can take possession, authorize disposal, or leave it for secure destruction.”
Emma looked at a jar in her hand.
Tomato basil.
She had no idea why she had picked it up.
“What do people usually do?”
“There isn’t a usual.”
She put the jar back.
“I don’t want it.”
“I can arrange destruction.”
Emma thought about the red frame.
Daniel pressing it into the diaper bag.
Robert breaking open the back.
The tiny memory card falling into his palm.
The object had governed almost a year of their lives.
She expected to feel something large.
Instead she felt annoyed that she still needed to make a decision about it.
“Yes,” she said. “Destroy it.”
“Okay.”
“Do I get proof?”
“Yes.”
She laughed softly.
“Of course I do.”
A week later Monica emailed a disposal certificate.
Emma saved it in the legal folder on her computer.
She did not print it.
On the twins’ first birthday, Robert set up a small inflatable pool in Emma’s backyard.
Nothing like the resort.
No giant slides.
No loud music.
Just eighteen inches of water, a plastic whale, and two babies who considered splashing the highest form of civilization.
Daniel came at noon carrying cupcakes.
He wore a blue shirt Eli immediately smeared with frosting.
Robert grilled hamburgers.
For nearly an hour, nobody argued.
Then Robert told Daniel he was holding the grilling spatula wrong.
Daniel said, “There’s no wrong way to hold a spatula.”
Robert said, “That is exactly what a man holding a spatula wrong would say.”
Emma stood at the patio table cutting strawberries.
She laughed before she could stop herself.
Both men looked at her.
For a second the old family arrangement appeared.
Not restored.
Not forgiven.
Just visible.
Then it passed.
Emma was grateful that it passed.
Later, after Daniel left and Robert carried trash bags to the curb, Emma took the twins upstairs for baths.
Noah crawled away naked.
Eli tried to drink bathwater.
Emma caught both of them eventually.
She dressed them in clean pajamas and sat on the nursery rug while they emptied a basket of toys around her.
The room had changed.
The rocking chair had moved beside the window.
The dresser where the red mirror once sat now held diapers, wipes, and an ordinary wooden picture frame containing a photograph from that afternoon.
Robert had taken it.
Emma sat on the grass with one twin in her lap while Daniel held the other several feet away.
Nobody was looking at the camera.
Robert’s finger covered part of the lens.
The picture was slightly crooked.
Emma liked it.
Eli crawled toward the dresser and pulled himself upright.
He slapped one palm against the drawer.
Noah laughed.
Emma reached for her phone to record them.
Her thumb stopped over the screen.
For a second she saw the red mirror again.
The black lens.
The wires.
Her own sleeping body reduced to a category on a slide.
Then Noah squealed because Eli had fallen onto his diapered bottom.
Emma looked at her sons.
She opened the camera.
“Hey,” she said.
Both boys turned toward her.
Not because they were being watched without knowing.
Because their mother had called their names.
May you like
Emma waited until they saw the phone.
Then she pressed record.
