Chapter 9: What Lily Said
The CPS interviewer's name was Carol.
She was calm and unhurried and she brought a small stuffed rabbit that she set on the table between herself and Lily without making anything of it.
I sat in the corner of the room.
Present, as Daniel had arranged, but quiet.
Carol asked Lily about her days.
What she liked to eat.
What her favorite thing about school was.
Lily answered carefully at first, watching Carol the way she watched everyone — checking, measuring.
Then Carol asked her about home.
Lily picked up the rabbit.
Turned it over in her hands.
"She doesn't like it when Daddy's not there," Lily said.
"Who doesn't like it?"
"Nicole." Lily said my wife's name the way she said the word *dentist*.
Factual.
Slightly braced.
"She gets different when he's gone."
"Different how?"
Lily thought about it.
"Quieter.
But not nice quiet.
The other kind."
"Can you tell me about the closet?"
Lily looked at me.
I nodded once.
"She puts me in there when I do something wrong," Lily said.
"Or when she says I did something wrong.
Sometimes I don't know what I did."
"How do you feel in there?"
"It's dark." She turned the rabbit over again.
"At first I didn't like it.
But then I started talking to my mum.
She can't talk back because she's in heaven.
But I talk anyway." She looked up at Carol.
"Is that weird?"
"No," Carol said.
"That's not weird at all."
"I told her about the camera.
My dad gave it to me for my birthday last year.
I hid it in there because I wanted her to see what it was like." She paused.
"I wanted someone to see."
I pressed my hand flat against my knee under the table.
"Did Nicole ever hurt you?" Carol asked.
"With her hands, or anything else?"
Lily was quiet for a moment.
"She grabbed my arm once.
When I spilled something.
It left a mark for a few days but then it went away." She said it plainly, without drama, the way children report things they've normalized.
"She told me not to tell Daddy because it would make him sad."
Carol wrote something down.
"You were very brave to use the camera," Carol said.
"Do you know that?"
Lily considered this seriously.
"I just wanted Dad to know," she said.
"He always believes me.
I just needed him to see it too."
On the drive home, Lily sat in the back seat and looked out the window.
After a few minutes she said, "Is Nicole coming back?"
"No," I said.
"She's not."
Lily nodded slowly.
"Okay." Then: "Can we get a dog?"
Something cracked open in my chest.
Not painfully.
The other way.
"Yeah," I said.
May you like
"I think we can get a dog."
She looked out the window again, satisfied, and I drove us home through the ordinary afternoon streets and did not trust myself to say anything else for a while.
