I slid the card out of his fingers.

Grandma forgives you.

No apology. No acknowledgment. She had inverted the whole thing and put the weight of the guilt into the hands of a traumatized six-year-old.

Daniel walked the doll to the trash. He photographed the card for the lawyer’s file, shredded the original, and blocked her number everywhere.

Mia started therapy the following week. At first she refused to talk about the garage at all. She drew instead — a yellow square, a tall gray rectangle, a tiny stick figure dwarfed by a huge black car.

In the bottom corner of every page, pressed so hard the crayon nearly tore through, one word.