“It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
“Which pretty much brings us back to where we started. Seems we’ve come full circle. Time to call it a night.”
Caroline felt Lili moving toward the door and she pushed herself away from the wall, preparing to make a hasty retreat. “Thanks,” she heard Lili say.
“For what?”
“For not telling me to get lost. For confiding in me. For making me feel, I don’t know…almost like…”
“…sisters?”
“I guess.”
“You really sure you want to be part of this family?” Michelle asked.
Caroline ran down the hall to her bedroom before she could hear Lili’s reply.
She was lying in her bed, wide awake at just after six A.M., having tossed and turned most of the night, her mind vacillating between hope and despair, anticipation and dread. What would she do if the tests proved Lili was indeed Samantha? What if they proved she wasn’t?
You really sure you want to be part of this family?
Michelle’s words bounced against the side of her brain, increasing in volume with each repetition, filling her head like a stubborn cold, leaving her barely able to breathe.
Her daughter was right. The family that Lili would be returning to—if the DNA test revealed she was, in fact, Samantha—was severely splintered, if not irreparably broken. Caroline and Hunter were divorced; Caroline barely tolerated her mother; she had a strained relationship with her brother, a strained relationship with Michelle…
I’m the common denominator here, Caroline acknowledged, finally climbing out of bed an hour later, her body a collection of aches and stiff joints. Everything, my fault.
She threw a housecoat over her cotton pajamas and headed down the stairs, past Michelle’s and Lili’s closed bedroom doors. She walked into the kitchen, moving as if she were on automatic pilot, and made a pot of coffee, then poured a large mug even before the coffeemaker indicated it had finished brewing.
“Is there enough for me?” Michelle asked, shuffling into the room on bare feet and plopping down into a chair at the kitchen table.
Wordlessly, Caroline reached into the cupboard for another mug and poured her daughter a steaming cup, depositing it in front of her. “You’re up early.”
“Didn’t get a whole lot of sleep. I take it you’re not going into work today.”
“I told them I’d be out for the rest of the week.”
Michelle nodded. “Probably a good idea.” She sipped her coffee, offered nothing further.
“I owe you an apology,” Caroline said.
“For what?”
“Last night. The way I acted. You were absolutely right to be angry.” She opened the breadbasket at the far end of the counter, removed two slices of raisin bread, and dropped them into the toaster. “I should have waited for you to come home to decorate the tree, at least given you the chance to…”
“Say no? I would have, you know. Said no.”
“I still should have waited, given you the choice.”
“Yeah, well. What’s done is done, right? Tree looks great, by the way.”
“It does look nice, doesn’t it?”
“Except for the missing angel on top. My turn to apologize. I’ll go out later, pick something up.”
“That would be nice.”
“Except I don’t believe in angels or any of that stuff, so I’ll probably just get a star or a snowflake. Something like that. Is that okay?”
“Sounds good.” The toast popped up. Caroline put the slices on a plate, opened the fridge, took out some butter, and applied it to the two browned surfaces. “You want a piece?” she asked her daughter, without thinking. “Sorry,” she said immediately. “Forgot you don’t eat bread.”
“I’ll eat the raisins,” Michelle said.
“You mean, right out of the bread?”
“As long as they don’t have butter on them.”
Caroline studied the two slices of toast. “You can’t have the raisins. They’re the best part.” She caught Michelle’s grin as she sat down at the table and began dunking the toast in her coffee.
“Oh, gross,” said Michelle.
“You didn’t used to think it was gross.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When you were little. You used to watch me dunking my toast in my coffee and insist on doing the same thing.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s the God’s truth. I swear.”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“Yeah, well. It’s true anyway.” Caroline smiled at the memory. “You were this little thing, I don’t think you were even two years old, but even then you were very clear about what you wanted, and what you wanted was to dunk your toast in coffee, the same way I did. So every morning I’d pour a little bit of coffee into your cup and we’d sit there and dunk our toast together. And one day, I was busy doing other things, and you came marching into the kitchen, quite indignant, and demanded, ‘Where’s my coffee?’?”
Michelle chuckled. “You’re making that up.”
“I’m not. You were quite the character.”