Brooke rolled her eyes. “Because Noah ruined everything.”
“He was four,” Ava whispered.
The sentence hung in the room like an accusation.
I remembered leaving for Dubai with a thousand calculations in my head and one promise at the center of all of them: five years, maybe less, and I would come home with enough money that Ava would never have to worry about bills again and Noah would never hear the word no for the wrong reasons. I remembered wiring eight thousand dollars a month to my mother because she already handled the family account and said she would move the money wherever Ava needed it.
I was not sending money to a caretaker.
I was financing my own family’s captivity.
“Did you have a phone?” I asked Ava.
“At first.”
“What happened to it?”
My mother answered before she could. “She lost it.”
Ava closed her eyes.
Brooke muttered, “Or sold it.”
I leaned both hands on the table. “Ava.”
She looked up again, and whatever she saw in my face gave her something she apparently had not been allowed for years.
Permission.