The Candle Labeled “To Brandon’s Girl”

Not cry — howl, the way you want to when someone hurts your child in a place you cannot reach and cannot fix.

Because Holly was not asking me a question about a candle.

She was asking me a question about herself, about her own reality, and the question was: is the bad thing they keep telling me true? Every subtle exclusion of three years had finally accumulated into a seven-year-old sitting on a bed genuinely unsure whether she was a real daughter or a kind of provisional one, a placeholder, a girl who belonged to her stepfather in some lesser conditional way that the grown-ups all seemed to understand and she was only now catching up to.

And the unbearable thing, the thing that made me want to howl, was that she asked it so calmly.