During the week Emma wrote Lauren a letter on paper, which embarrassed them all with its seriousness. She wrote: I don't want you to be my mom. I want you to be Lauren who doesn't lie. If you go, come back at Christmas and don't bring a speech. If you stay, you can keep helping with math unless you become weird about it. I heard the voicemail again. I am not as mad. I am still mad sometimes. That is allowed.
Lauren took the job and did not take it as an escape. She stayed through December, trained a replacement, left in January. At the airport Emma hugged her and said, "Daylight," like a password. Lauren said, "Daylight," into the gray hood. David kissed Lauren then, in front of his daughter, a brief kiss that did not claim a future. Emma looked at the floor and then at them and did not run. It was not a blessing. It was a tolerance with a future tense. They would learn the difference slowly.
The second choice was David's, alone, in the spring after Lauren left. A colleague tried to set him up with a woman who had never known Claire and would not have to live inside a sentence. He went to coffee. The woman was kind and funny and unburdened by their particular dead. He came home and told Emma he had gone, because secrecy had become, in their house, a kind of mold. Emma said, "Did you like her?" He said, "Yes. Not enough to move the furniture." The woman did not become a story. The choice was the telling.
The third choice was Emma's, at fourteen, when she came home from a dance angry at a boy and found her father on the porch with the light fixed and his phone dark in his hand, missing Lauren in a way that had no performance in it. Emma sat on the step. "You could visit her," she said. "I'm not a baby. Grandma can stay over. If you go and you come back worse, that's on you. If you go and you come back the same, that's information."
He went for a weekend. Lauren's new apartment had a real window and fewer plants, a temporary austerity. They walked by a river that was not their river. They slept in the same bed and did not pretend it was casual. In the morning Lauren said, "I don't want a double life. I want a town I can stand and a man who doesn't need me to be a secret and a girl who calls me Lauren. This city gives me one of those. You are another. Emma is the third, and she doesn't live here." David said, "Then we don't counterfeit a household out of weekends." They agreed, painfully, to be people who loved each other and did not stitch the love into a marriage across a distance that would make Emma into a commuter between truths. On the plane home he felt both the cut and the cleanliness of it. He told Emma the truth in the car from the airport. She cried because the adult world was made of doors that closed without villains. Then she asked for drive-through fries, and they ate them in the parking lot like conspirators.