Claire looked down at her card for a long moment. She did not write anything.
"Okay," she said. "Last one." She did not read it off the card. She folded the card in half and held it in both hands and looked straight at Natalie, with Ruth's way of looking right at you, and Natalie understood that all the other questions had been a staircase, and this was the landing.
"Why did you stop coming?" Claire said. "She told me you came to my first birthday. She had a picture of it. You holding me with frosting on my face. And then you never came again. She told me it wasn't my fault, every single year she told me, and I believed her until I was like eight, and then I stopped believing her. Because why else? If it wasn't me, then why?"
Natalie had known this question was coming. She had rehearsed answers for eleven days. Now she found she did not want any of them.
"You cried," she said. "At the party. When I held you. You reached for your mom and you cried for her. And I thought, she's right. That's her mother. I'm a visitor. And I thought if I kept coming, you would grow up with somebody who showed up once a year and made everybody careful, and I didn't want to be that for you. That's the reason I gave myself. It's true. But it isn't the whole truth, and I promised myself I wouldn't give you half of anything." She took a breath. "The whole truth is it hurt too much. Every time I saw you, I lost you again. And I was twenty-one and alone and I didn't know how to survive that over and over, so I just—stopped. I cut it off. And I told myself it was for you. Some of it was. More of it was for me. And it wasn't your fault. It wasn't anything you did. It was the thing I couldn't do."
Claire's eyes had filled. She blinked hard. She did not let them fall.