Emma wore the dress to the dance with the gray hoodie in the car for the ride home, a contingency. She did not win a title. She danced with a friend and once with the boy who had made her angry at fourteen and was now only a person. In a photograph David would keep in a drawer and not on the mantel, she looked like Claire and like herself, cream fabric, dark hair, a smile that did not ask the camera for mercy. She came home barefoot. "It was just a dress," she said, astonished. "I was happy in it for an hour. I think that counts."
"It counts," he said.
He called Lauren that night, because some news belongs to the people who carried the earlier chapters. Lauren listened. She was quiet in the way of someone crying carefully. "Tell her I am proud and I am not her mother and both of those are permanent," she said. David told Emma in the morning. Emma rolled her eyes and looked pleased, a combination she had perfected.
The fifth choice was the one that nearly broke the brace.
Emma was seventeen, applying to colleges, writing the essay she had avoided at twelve. She wrote about the aisle. She wrote it without pity-language, with the phone and the question and the voicemail's instruction about sentences. A counselor at school, not Lauren, warned her that admissions offices liked resilience narratives. Emma said, "This is not resilience. This is a report." She showed it to David before she sent it. He had to leave the room in the middle and come back. "It's true," he said. "Send it if you can live with strangers knowing. If you can't, it's still true in this house."