Elena approached carefully, the way one might approach a wounded animal. “Dad.”
“Elena—”
Elena stood there for a long moment. Then she did something that surprised them both.
“You came out screaming,” Margaret continued, “and you never stopped. You fought me on everything. What to wear, what to eat, what to believe. Leo smiled. Leo made peace. Leo was easy.” She set down her tea. “I am not a woman who was built for difficult children. I wanted a daughter who would bake with me and get married in white and give me grandchildren I could hold without explaining why there were two mommies.”
“I was angry at you for being late.” Margaret’s voice cracked. “I am still angry. But I was angry at you long before Leo died. I have been angry at you since the day you were born.”
Margaret stood in the doorway, veil pushed back, face pale and sharp. She was seventy-one, but grief had aged her another decade overnight. Her hands trembled slightly around a cup of untouched tea.
Elena’s stomach turned. “It’s been three days.”
But knowing better and doing better were two different currencies, and Elena had spent all of hers on guilt.
Margaret closed the door. The sound of the latch was a period at the end of a sentence.
“I’m not going to pretend,” Elena said quietly. “I’m not going to come to Sunday dinners or pretend you didn’t say what you said. But I’m not going to let you rot in here, either. Leo wouldn’t want that. And honestly? Neither would I.”
“No,” Elena agreed. “You don’t. But Leo did.”
“You don’t get to call me that.” She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. “You don’t get to pretend we’re a family now that Leo’s gone. We stopped being a family the day you told me that being a writer wasn’t ‘serious work.’ You stopped being my father when you let her cut me out of the will because I married a woman.”
“You don’t get to finish that sentence.” Elena straightened. “You don’t get to rewrite history because Leo died and now you’re lonely. You made your choices. You made them every single day for almost four decades. And I made mine—I chose my wife. I chose my daughter. I chose to leave this house and never look back.”
“Then why are you here?” Margaret whispered.
Margaret looked up. Her face was wrecked. “I don’t deserve that.”
