“Daddy, does our mommy think about us?”
***
I put down my coffee and looked at her across the table.
“I don’t know what she thinks, baby,” I said honestly. “But I know what I think. Every single morning.”
“What do you think, Daddy?”
“That you two are the best thing I ever did.”
Lily, not to be left out of anything, said from behind her cereal bowl: “Even when we’re being annoying?”
“Especially then,” I replied.
That became a thing between us.
“I don’t know what she thinks, baby.”
***
Then came the teenage years.
Whenever one of them got through something hard, I’d say quietly, “You were chosen this morning.”
They rolled their eyes the way teenagers do when they secretly need to hear something.
Whenever the girls asked about Claire, I gave them the same honest, incomplete answer: “Your mother made a choice she thought she needed to make. I made a different one.”
I never called their mother a monster.
