The Candle Labeled “To Brandon’s Girl”

And that any future contact between Gene and our family — any visit, any holiday, any place at any table — would from this day forward require one thing, and one thing only: Holly’s permission.

Not Brandon’s.

Not mine.

Holly’s.

The child she had labeled a visitor, a guest, Brandon’s girl, now held the only key that mattered — the key to whether Gene remained in our lives at all.

That was why she screamed.

Not over a candle, not over a scene, but because in the space of one folded card the entire architecture of her power had been inverted, and the person she had spent three years teaching to feel powerless was now, by her son’s careful hand, the single person on earth who got to decide her place in the family.

Brandon did not look triumphant.