Not with any real detail.
Not the way you’d expect someone to remember an actual event instead of a cover story assembled under pressure.
“I think you should leave for tonight,” I told her. “I need to talk to Josie alone.”
“You’re taking a four-year-old’s word over mine?”
Miriam’s voice cracked, somewhere between hurt and fury.
For the first time all evening I watched something flicker behind her expression.
Something that didn’t match the warmth she’d shown at that dinner table for the past hour.
“I’m taking my daughter somewhere quiet,” I said. “That’s all this is, right now.”
She left.
My sister stayed the night.
I sat with Josie on her bed later that night.
The hallway light on.
Her stuffed rabbit tucked under one arm the way it always was when she was scared.
I asked her, as gently as I knew how, to tell me more.
About the arm-squeezing.
About the days when Miriam’s face changed.
She told me it happened mostly on the days I worked late.
That Miriam would be sweet right up until my car pulled out of the driveway.
Then something in her would shift.
Quick, like a light switching off.
She told me about being sent to her room for things that didn’t make sense to her.
A spilled cup.
A toy left on the floor.
