small backyard below, she finally said something close to an apology, the real kind, not the closing-argument kind she’d delivered three years earlier.
“I spent your whole childhood terrified you’d end up like him,” she said. “Careless. Absent. I think I confused control with protection somewhere along the way.”
“You could have just told me that,” I said. “Instead of the piano lessons and the private tutors.”
“I know,” she said. “I didn’t know how to say it any other way back then. I’m still learning how to say it now, honestly.”
“You’re doing better than you think,” I told her, and meant it, watching Milo’s small silhouette dart across the yard chasing a light that kept just out of reach.
