I didn’t have an answer for her that felt honest and also felt safe to say out loud to an eleven-year-old, so I just reached back and squeezed her hand and told her we’d figure it out, and we drove home mostly in silence, the Christmas lights strung along other people’s houses sliding past the windows the whole way.
Daniel got home about forty minutes after we did, having gone straight from work to my mother’s house and found it empty, then called me in confusion until I explained, as evenly as I could manage with my own voice shaking, what had happened. I watched something harden in his face as I talked, the particular quiet fury of a father who wants very badly to drive back over there and say something he’d probably regret, and instead simply came and sat down with us in the living room, one arm around each of us.
That night, I made Emma hot chocolate with the little marshmallows she likes, the good kind, not the mini ones, and wrapped her in the fleece blanket from the back of the couch, and we sat together while she tried, in her careful eleven-year-old way, to process what had happened.
“I ruined Christmas,” she said at one point, staring into her mug.
“You didn’t ruin anything.”
“I shouldn’t have brought so much stuff. Maybe it looked like I was trying too hard.”
