She sent it. She also, that spring, asked him the question she had been saving.
They were in the garage, in Claire's car, which still would not be sold. The vanilla was gone. The dust remained. Emma's hands were on the wheel though the engine was off. "Did you want Lauren before Mom died in a way that would have become a real thing even if Mom had lived?"
David felt the question find the exact joint. He could have said no and bought peace. He did not. "I don't know," he said. "The sickness was the room we were in. I can't run the experiment where she gets well and I meet Lauren only as her friend at a barbecue and feel nothing. What I know is that I didn't touch Lauren, and I did imagine a kindness that was more than friendship, and your mother saw it, and she told me imagination isn't a crime and secrecy is. If Claire had lived, I think the imagining would have been a thing I had to confess and kill, or confess and be forgiven for and still kill. I don't get to be the hero of the version where she lives. I only get to be decent in the version where she didn't."
Emma nodded, crying without drama, a seventeen-year-old who had learned that adults are unfinished. "Thank you for not making it pretty."
"She wouldn't have wanted pretty," he said.