“She was messy.”
“She still is.”
Ruth looked at me.
Then said:
“Maybe the problem isn’t that she dislikes her childhood.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe she dislikes what other people might think about it.”
I stared at the old photograph.
I’d had years to become comfortable with our circumstances.
Lauren had spent those same years trying to escape them.
That was not automatically wrong.
I was proud she’d built a career and could afford things I couldn’t.
What hurt was the possibility that she now saw me as the evidence of a life she wanted forgotten.
That afternoon, I went through the wedding invitation again.