She’d always been a smidge obsessed with the mystery of my wedding picture. The unknown man who had stood by my side. The one who was supposed to remain there but had left me high and dry.
I hadn’t had the heart to get rid of it.
She’d only become more interested in it now that she had a name to the face.
“It was a great day. And yep, we found the perfect dress to go along with Emily’s.”
She grinned as she looked at me, her cheeks pink and her dark eyes dancing with unending joy.
My heart.
My heart.
It panged.
Shivered in the distress of uncertainty and clutched in those sparks of hope that were growing brighter with every second.
“I am so, so excited to wear mine. Did you know it came in the mail today from the package man? Papa let me try it on. It’s sooo pretty with my new, new shoes, and my cast doesn’t even look a little bit bad in it.”
She lifted her broken wing.
I touched her chin. Devotion rode free on the waves of affection that pressed from my being. “You will be the prettiest little hostess in the whole world.”
Daisy beamed. A ray of light. “Come on, you’ve gotsta see it. I bet Mr. Richard will think I’m so pretty.”
Yeah.
Obsessed.
I understood the affliction.
She dragged me inside and upstairs to her room where she’d ripped apart the box, packaging strewn, her dress a crumpled mess on her bed. “Papa said I haves to be so careful not to get it dirty so I can’t play with it until the special day.”
“That’s a great idea,” I told her as she was whipping off her shirt and fumbling into the fluffy pink dress that I had ordered online, my little whirlwind shrugging into the garment and struggling to get it on over her cast.
“Let me help you,” I told her, situating it over the bulkiness of her arm and helping her to get it over her body.
She slid her feet into those shoes that I worried were going to be worn out before the wedding day two weeks from now. She brushed the wild mane out of her face with two hands, grinning in the floor-length mirror hanging on the back of her door. She swayed from side-to-side. “See, Mommy! It’s so pretty. I loves it.” She squeezed her hands together in a grateful prayer.
I edged up behind her, planted a kiss to the top of her head, fought the tumble of fear I felt.
This unending worry that I was stumbling toward something I wouldn’t recover from.
But I would fight for her.
For the best thing for her.
Whatever that was.
“You are so beautiful. Inside and out. My sunshine,” I whispered.
She grinned wider. “Take a picture and send it to Mr. Richard.”
I cringed.
She frowned. “You don’t like him?”
She touched the handwriting on her cast, and my eyes were drawn to the inscription he’d left.
Daisy, a precious, perfect flower. Never be afraid to explore, learn, and bloom. Grow with all the love because love is what you are.
“No, sweetheart, I don’t dislike him. Things are just very complicated between us.”
“But you love him?” she asked almost carefully. Hopefully.
“I used to. A lot. But that was a long time ago.” My words were soft. Cautious. I wouldn’t lie to my child, but she sure didn’t need to hear the sordid details.
“I think he loves you a lot a lot.”
My spirit thrashed, and I met her gaze through the mirror, fiddling with an errant lock of her hair. “Why would you say that?”
“Because he looks at you that special way. Like when Papa looks at Nana.”
Old sadness pulsed. “I don’t think so, sweetheart.”
Except sayin’ it felt like a lie. The confessions he had left me with. The way he’d touched me. The way he’d looked at me in the very way that Daisy was talking about.
Like I was the stars in his sky.
Endless.
The light at the end of his forever that he had promised to me.
“I know so.” It wasn’t even an argument.
I shifted her around and knelt in front of her, pushing back the disaster of hair from her face, trying to frame it into words that she might understand. “I think he used to love me that way. Maybe it just makes him sad when he looks at me and remembers what that was like.”
“No, Mommy. I see it. Amor, amor, amor.” She sang it like a love song the way my daddy would.
My heart clutched. “You are the amor.” I barely managed to get it out around the emotion that warbled in my throat.
“We all got amor,” she told me, resolute. Her voice dropped to a secretive whisper when she said, “Mr. Richard, too.”
I pressed a kiss to her forehead because I couldn’t answer it or respond to it. There were too many questions that swirled and toiled and dug up the dirt on the grave that had been our marriage.
Ripping me to shreds.
Eddies of distrust and surges of the need to believe. The hope I’d always sworn I would cling to but was terrified I’d only be a fool to trust in now.
Terrified of letting myself go. Of giving in. Because if I lost him again…
My chest nearly caved at the thought.
I tipped up her chin, my sweet child looking up at me with all the faith in the world. Trusting me to give her the right answers when I couldn’t seem to come up with a proper answer for a single one.
“Every person deserves to be loved, Daisy. Every single one.”
But no one deserved to be destroyed the way he’d destroyed me.
“And sometimes people are so, so sad, and they need to be loved an extra little bit.”
God.
This child.
I touched her nose with mine. A soft caress. “Sometimes I think your heart is too big.”
She stared at me, our eyes connected, our souls one when we were together.
This child that hadn’t grown of my body but was one-hundred-percent mine.
“I just need it to
