“We were?”
“Yes.”
“All of us?”
“All of you.”
The answer seemed to settle something that the child had not known how to ask.
Then she touched the key hanging against her sweatshirt.
“He gave it back.”
Her mother looked at the string and closed her eyes for a moment.
She remembered writing the note.
She remembered feeling faint more than once after coming home with the twins.
She remembered telling herself she needed to get up, drink water, make a call, do one more thing.
Then there was nothing until the hospital.
The note had not been a grand plan.
It had been the hurried thinking of an exhausted mother who felt herself getting worse and was trying to leave breadcrumbs in case she could not finish what she started.
The key was one of them.
Her daughter had turned it into something else.
Not a rule about keeping the house locked.
