“Is she okay?” I asked David one night. “She barely looked at me at dinner.”
“She’s a teenager, honey. Grades, boys. Don’t take it personally.”
“Did something happen?”
“I’ll talk to her.”
That became the pattern: I’d ask, he’d handle it, and he’d come back with a soft explanation that somehow always left me feeling small for asking.
A few months after our wedding, Chloe left for college ten hours away and stopped coming home — not for Thanksgiving, not Christmas, not summer. “She got a job on campus,” David explained. “Maybe she needs the money, Al. Don’t make her feel guilty.”
So I stopped asking. Year after year, I stopped asking. When his phone buzzed late at night, he was already reaching for it. “Just my brother,” he’d say. Or, “Spam again.” I never once checked for myself. Guilt makes you an excellent liar to yourself. Love does the rest.
I noticed small things and let them go — a Christmas card from Chloe’s roommate that arrived already opened, tape neatly slit down the top, which David blamed on a careless mailman. I remembered that he was always the one who checked our mail. Always, even sick, even in the rain, even when I offered.
I remembered a loud argument in the garage the weekend before she left for school — his voice low and hard, hers cracking as she said, “That’s not fair.” When I asked, he said it was about her switching majors. Nothing to worry about.
I believed him. I always did.
