Chapter 09

Callie's POV

He looked at Lily for exactly two seconds.

Then he said "Go back to bed" in the voice he used for things that were inconveniencing him.

Lily did not move.

"Daddy—"

"I said go to bed Lily."

"Derek." I stepped forward. "She just woke up. Lower your voice."

He turned to me so fast I stepped back without meaning to.

"Do not tell me how to speak to my own child." His voice had dropped but the edge in it had sharpened. "This is exactly the problem. You coddle her. You parade her around hospitals and exhibitions and parking lots and wonder why she cannot sleep through a normal conversation—"

"It is eleven o clock and she is four—"

His hand moved.

Not a slap. He grabbed a fistful of my hair at the back of my head and pulled once. Hard enough that my neck snapped back and my eyes watered immediately.

Lily made a sound I had never heard from her before.

"If you ever." He said it very quietly directly into my ear. "Challenge me like that again in my own daughter's presence. You will not like what comes next."

He let go.

Straightened his jacket.

Looked at Lily who was standing in the hallway with her rabbit pressed to her mouth and her eyes very wide and said "Go to sleep" one more time like nothing had happened.

Then he walked out.

The front door clicked shut behind him.

I stood in the kitchen with my hand pressed to the back of my head and my breath coming too fast and Lily still in the hallway watching me.

"Mummy." Her voice was very small.

"I am okay sweetheart." I crossed to her immediately and crouched down and kept my face as steady as I could. "I am okay. Let us get you back to bed."

She let me carry her.

She did not say another word.

---

Dr. Anderson called two days later with something that sounded almost like good news.

"She has a window between cycles," he said. "A few days where her body needs rest more than treatment. Fresh air would actually help. Somewhere quiet. Low stimulation."

"The park?" I asked.

"The park," he said.

Lily had not been to the park in six weeks.

When I told her she looked at me for a moment like she was checking whether it was real. Then she went to get Mr. Rabbit so he could come too.

---

It was a Tuesday afternoon and the park was quiet. Mostly mothers with small children and a few older couples walking the path around the outside. Lily went straight for the swings and I pushed her gently and she closed her eyes and tilted her face up toward the sky and for twenty minutes she just existed without anything heavy attached to her.

I stood behind her and pushed and watched her face and let myself breathe.

Then Noah appeared.

He came from the direction of the path with his hands in his pockets and that expression he had that was too old for his face. Vanessa was somewhere behind him on a bench. Close enough to watch. Far enough to look uninvolved.

He stopped beside the swings and waited until Lily slowed down on her own.

"Your hair is falling out," he said.

Lily looked at him.

"You are rotting from the inside." He said it simply. Informatively. The way you tell someone it is raining outside. "That is why your hair falls out. My mum told me."

I was moving before he finished the sentence.

But Lily did not cry.

She did not say anything.

She just looked at Noah for a long moment and then she looked down at Mr. Rabbit in her lap and she went somewhere inside herself that I could not follow and she did not come back for the rest of the afternoon.

Not on the walk home. Not during dinner. Not during her bath. She answered when I spoke to her but her eyes were somewhere else entirely and she held Mr. Rabbit so tightly against her chest that I was afraid she would pull his ear off.

Lily's tears I could hold. I had held them many times.

This silence was something different.

This silence frightened me.

---

I went back to Vanessa before we left the park.

I should not have. I knew that while I was doing it. But I had just watched a five year old tell my sick daughter she was rotting from the inside and I was not made of the material required to walk away quietly.

"What you told him to say to her." My voice was not raised. But it was not soft either. "That is not something a child comes up with alone. You coached him."

Vanessa looked up from her phone.

Her phone which I realized one second too late was already pointed at me.

"I have no idea what you are talking about." She said it calmly. Pleasantly. For the camera. "I just brought my son to the park."

"Do not do that."

"You seem very upset." Still pleasant. Still recording. Tilting the angle slightly upward so the shot showed me standing over her. "Is everything okay?"

I stepped back.

She kept recording for another three seconds after I walked away.

---

The clip was online by seven that evening.

Forty seconds. Captioned: *CEO's estranged wife screams at five year old in public park. Is this who has custody of his daughter?*

My phone lit up with a message twenty minutes after it went up.

Derek.

*You are an embarrassment. I am reconsidering the birthday arrangement entirely.*

I read it twice.

Not because I did not understand it the first time.

Because I needed a moment to absorb the fact that his first reaction to watching that video was not to ask why Lily had not spoken in four hours.

It was to text me about appearances.

I put my phone face down on the counter.

In the next room Lily was sitting on her bed in the dark holding Mr. Rabbit with both arms.

Still silent.

Still somewhere I could not reach.