Instead, she simply nodded.

“All right.”

She held out the bakery bag.

“Perhaps you could take these for Lily.”

“No.”

“Daniel…”

“I said no.”

His mother slowly lowered her hand.

Lily stared at the bag.

“Are those cinnamon rolls?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” the woman said. “They are.”

Daniel opened the passenger door.

“Get in the car, Lily.”

His daughter obeyed, although she looked back through the window.

The elderly woman stood beside the school fence as Daniel drove away. In the rearview mirror, he saw her bend to pick up something that had fallen from the paper bag.

One of the cinnamon rolls had slipped onto the pavement.

She wrapped it in a napkin before placing it back inside.

That evening, Lily asked her father why he had been so unkind to the woman.

Daniel was washing dishes.

“She shouldn’t have approached you.”

“But she knew your name.”

“Lots of people know my name.”

“She called you Danny.”

He shut off the faucet.

Lily sat at the kitchen island, turning a pencil between her fingers.

“Was she your mom?”

Daniel looked toward the living room, where his wife, Rebecca, was sorting laundry.

He could have lied.

Instead, he said, “Yes.”

Lily considered this.

“I thought Grandma Evelyn died.”

Daniel dried his hands.

“That’s what I told you.”

“Why?”

He had spent seventeen years finding ways not to answer that question.

“Because sometimes people do things that make it impossible to have them in your life.”

Lily looked down at her pencil.

“Did she do something bad?”

Daniel remembered his father sitting in a hospital bed, his left hand trembling as he tried to lift a glass of water. He remembered the bruise near his temple, the medical bills, the police officer who had come to their house, and his mother standing in the kitchen without offering an explanation.

“Yes,” he said.

“What did she do?”

Daniel placed the dish towel on the counter.

“She hurt someone I loved.”

Lily stopped asking questions.

But later, when Daniel went upstairs to check on her, he found a drawing on her desk.

It showed an old woman standing outside a school beside a little girl. Above them, Lily had written in purple marker:

The grandma I met today.

Daniel stood looking at it for a long time.

Then he turned off the bedroom light.

Chapter Two – The Last Telephone Call

Three weeks later, Evelyn Mercer called her son at 6:42 on a Thursday evening.

Daniel was in the garage trying to repair a loose shelf.

His phone vibrated on the workbench.

He recognized the number immediately. He had never saved it under her name, but he had never forgotten it either.

He let the call go to voicemail.