Kyle said I was acting like they were monsters.
My father said my mother was crying and I owed her an apology.
The old reflex flared up in me so fast it made me dizzy. I wanted to explain. I wanted to soften it. I wanted to make it easier to hear, easier to absorb, easier for them to return without admitting how ugly they had been.
Then Maisie made a sleepy noise from her bassinet, and the moment passed.
No, I thought.
No more.
I did not answer.
Days went by. Then a week. Then another.
No one called. No one apologized. No one asked to see the baby they had treated like a nuisance.
The silence should have been peaceful. Instead it felt like a room after a fight, when the furniture is still where it always was but the air has changed.
Christmas crept closer. Decorations went up in windows across my neighborhood. Holiday music became unavoidable. I bought a cheap tree from the grocery store and wrestled it into a stand in my living room while Maisie watched from her swing with grave baby concentration. I bought one ornament that said Baby’s First Christmas and cried in the checkout line for no good reason other than that I had never felt so protective and so lonely at the same time.
Vanessa invited us to spend Christmas with her family in California. I said yes immediately. I was not going to spend another holiday waiting to be remembered by people who had already chosen not to choose me.
Then, three weeks after the Thanksgiving explosion, my father called.
Not texted.
Called.
I stared at the screen until it nearly stopped ringing. Then I picked up.
“Jenna,” he said.
His voice sounded older than I remembered.
“I’m here,” I replied.
There was a pause, the kind that reveals effort. “Can we talk?”
“I’m listening.”
He exhaled. “I spoke to Frank.”
Uncle Frank was my father’s older brother, a therapist who had spent decades refusing to participate in family mythology. He was quiet, careful, and devastatingly unimpressed by manipulation. If my father had told him what happened, then Frank would have told him the truth.
“And?” I asked.
“And he said we have treated you terribly,” my father said. The words came out roughly, as if each one had to be dragged over something sharp. “Especially since Maisie was born.”
My grip tightened on the phone.
