Mark shut his eyes.
Linda whispered Emily’s name.
Emily kept going.
“I wanted one day where everything wasn’t about the fire, the scars, the chair, the tragedy. One day where people could just look at me and see something beautiful.”
I felt every person near us absorb those words.
Daniel’s expression hardened, but he did not shout.
“Your sister was sitting quietly in the second row.”
Emily said nothing.
“She wasn’t making this about the fire,” he continued. “You did that when you tried to hide her because of it.”
Emily’s fingers tightened around the bouquet.
“You don’t understand our family.”
“No,” Daniel said. “Apparently I don’t.”
That landed harder than anything Margaret could have said.
In the year Emily had been with him, Daniel and I had only spent time together a handful of times.
He had never treated me like a symbol of courage or a tragedy he needed to solve.
He spoke to me the same way he spoke to everyone else, and when a restaurant table once blocked the easiest path for my chair, he simply moved his own chair without turning it into a performance.
That small normalcy had made me trust him more than he knew.
Now he looked as though he was searching backward through every conversation Emily had ever had with him.
Margaret rose again, slower this time.
Daniel looked at her.
“How did you know?”
Margaret glanced at Emily before answering.
