Emma cooked because he wanted her to. I barely tasted anything. Ryan talked about work and traffic and contractors in a perfectly normal voice. That was the danger of men like him. Monsters who look like monsters are easier to fight. Men like Ryan make you doubt your own eyesight.
When I left, I held Emma at the door a second longer than usual.
“I love you,” I whispered.
“I love you too,” she said.
It sounded like goodbye.
I didn’t sleep that night. I sat at my kitchen table thinking through every useless path. Police with what evidence? My daughter says she fell. My son-in-law frightens me. He controls the room. He makes everything feel smaller. I had worked around the system too long not to know how easily a woman can be dying in installments and still be told to come back when there is more proof.
December passed like that.
In January she met me once at a crowded market. She was thinner. She touched a yellow lily at one stall and said, “You used to buy me these when I got an A. You said yellow was the color of joy.”
“It is,” I said.
She looked at me behind dark lenses. “I don’t feel joyful anymore, Mom.”
That was the first crack in the lie.