Marcus recited it without needing the scrap of paper they had once written it on, after a session with Denise, sitting in the car in a grocery store parking lot with rain on the windshield: "We made a mistake because we were scared, and then we told the truth because we loved you, and loving you means not keeping that kind of secret anymore."
"That's the one," Aaliyah said.
Elias appeared behind his father, library book under his arm, missing tooth on full display. "Are we talking about Grandma?"
"We are," Aaliyah said.
"Can I wear the gold necklace when we see her? The long one? She likes when I'm fancy."
Aaliyah looked at Marcus. Marcus looked at Aaliyah. The gold necklace lived now in a small box on Ruth's dresser at the facility, brought out for visits when Ruth asked for it and sometimes when she did not remember to ask. Aaliyah thought of the laundry room doorway two years earlier. She thought of always, and the way the word had cut, and the way cut things could still, with enough care and enough time and enough refusal of neatness, grow something green at the edges.