The hard choices arrived not as a single cliff but as a series of ordinary doors with different weather behind them.
The first was Lauren's job. A district two states away offered her a counseling directorship, more money, fewer nights explaining herself in the grocery store. She told David on a Sunday in Emma's thirteenth year, at the kitchen table, with Emma present because they had sworn off kitchens that operated by exclusion. The offer was good. The distance was real. Lauren said, "I can stay and become a person who resents this town for witnessing me. Or I can go and we can see what we are when no one is watching. Or I can go and we can call this a finished thing that did not fail so much as run out of room."
Emma looked at the pothos, which had traveled to the kitchen for more light and was thriving in a way that felt like showing off. "If you go, are you leaving because of me?"
"No," Lauren said. "If I go, it's because my work is a life and not just a waiting room. If I stay, it has to be for the work too, and for you and your father as you actually are, not as a repair project. I won't use you as my reason in either direction. That's the lesson. Your mother was annoyingly clear."
David felt the old practicing-widowhood impulse: to decide quickly so the feeling would stop. He did not. He said, "We take a week. Emma gets a vote that is not a veto and not nothing. I get a spine. You get to want things that are not us."