Chapter 16 — Chosen

We drove home to Spokane that afternoon, the three of us, and Holly fell asleep in the back seat before we reached the highway, the red box still tucked in her beaded purse and the four-dollar candle, of all things, held in both her hands, because she had decided — for her own reasons, which she did not explain and we did not ask — that she wanted to keep it.

I have thought about that a great deal since: that my daughter chose to keep the very object that had been meant to wound her.

I asked her about it, weeks later, gently, and she said, “It smells nice, and now it’s mine, and the tag is wrong.” And that was the whole of it, in a seven-year-old’s economy: the tag is wrong. She had decided the tag was wrong, and having decided it, she was free of it, and she could keep the candle because the candle was just a candle and the cruelty had lost its hold.