Three weeks after the Sunday morning confrontation, my mother called to say she wanted to take Ellie to the park.
She sounded warm and normal on the phone, the way she always sounded when the manipulation had shifted into a quieter gear. I was genuinely relieved. I thought she’d worked through whatever anger she’d been carrying and was ready to move forward. People are capable of that, sometimes. I still believed she was, then.
Ellie was ecstatic. She packed her little backpack herself, stuffing in crackers and her unicorn, and held my mother’s hand down the front walk with the full, uncomplicated trust that children extend to the people who are supposed to protect them.
I watched them drive away and went back inside.
What I didn’t know was that Diego had been calling my mother constantly since Jessica ended things, and that somewhere in those calls, the two of them had arrived at a plan. Diego wanted me to understand what it felt like to lose something. My mother had decided she knew how to teach me that lesson. The plan was elegant in its cruelty and required nothing more than walking away.
