Oh, there you are.

What happened, sweetheart.

The reaction of a person with nothing to hide.

Brenda’s reaction was annoyance, the specific annoyance of someone whose careful arrangement had just been undone, whose plan had a piece out of place.

In that single unguarded question, before she had time to compose a face for me, I saw exactly how she regarded my daughter: not as a child she loved, not even as a child she disliked, but as a logistical problem she had solved and that had now, irritatingly, un-solved itself.

You cannot fake your way out of a reaction that fast.