“What?”
“If he was unhappy, could he have told you?”
“Of course.”
“Then there you go.”
Emma, who had listened to approximately ten percent of this conversation, pushed a napkin across the table toward Clare.
On it she had arranged three sugar packets in a row.
“This is your new castle,” she announced.
Clare stared at the packets.
One was white.
One brown.
One yellow.
“That’s a very small castle.”
“You have to start it first.”
Her father smiled despite himself.
Clare felt another laugh rise in her chest.
This one did not break.
“That’s true,” she said.
Emma began adding more packets.
Clare watched her construct leaning walls around a wooden stirrer.
Something about the ridiculous little structure loosened a knot Clare had been tightening for a month.
She had kept thinking Marcus had taken their future.
But their future had never been a possession stored somewhere for him to steal.
It had been a plan they were supposed to build together.
He had walked away from it.
That did not mean he had walked away with Clare’s entire life.
She looked at the notebook.
For the first time, the cancellation list did not look like a record of humiliation.
It looked like administration.
Painful administration, certainly.
But not proof that she had failed as a woman, a partner, or a person.
Clare picked up her pen.
Emma’s father noticed.
“You don’t have to do that now.”
“I know.”
Clare drew a line beneath the list.
Under it, she wrote one sentence.
Call Mom and tell her the truth.
Not the wedding logistics.
Not the refund amounts.
Not what Marcus had said.
The truth about Clare.
That she was not fine.
She closed the notebook.
“I think I’m going to go home,” she said.
Emma frowned.
“Because you’re sad?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not fun.”
“No.
But I think I’m going to stop pretending I’m not sad.”
Emma seemed to find this acceptable.
She pointed at the sugar-packet castle.
“You can take that.”
Clare smiled.
“I think your dad might need the sugar.”
“Daddy doesn’t need that much sugar.”
