“Please say something.”
I turned off the water.
“You’ve told me what you want.”
Her face tightened.
“And?”
I looked at the woman I had raised.
The girl who once slept with a night-light because she was afraid of shadows.
The teenager whose prom dress I’d sewn at this very table.
The young woman who cried in my arms after her first serious breakup.
“If that’s your decision,” I said, “I won’t force you to introduce me to people who don’t want to meet me.”
Lauren started crying harder.
I wanted to ask her to reconsider.
I wanted her to remember everything we’d been through.
Instead, I said something much simpler.