She looked as though she was checking whether she had followed instructions.
I kissed her forehead and handed her the muffins.
"Your favorites."
She managed a small smile. "Thank you, Grandma."
Vanessa glanced at the bag. "Oh, that's sweet. But we already had lunch, so perhaps she can have one later."
There was nothing unreasonable about the statement.
That was what made the next few hours so difficult to understand.
Nothing Vanessa said was openly cruel. Nothing she did was dramatic enough to justify the alarm spreading through my chest. She offered coffee, asked about my garden, and spoke warmly about how much she enjoyed taking care of Lily.
But every time my granddaughter tried to speak, Vanessa seemed to appear with another instruction.
Sit properly.
Don't interrupt.
Use your inside voice.
Go wash your hands.
And whenever Lily looked toward me, she seemed to be waiting for permission to behave like an ordinary eight-year-old.
I had spent almost two years telling myself that children changed after losing a parent.
Now I was beginning to wonder how much of Lily's quietness had anything to do with grief.
And how much had to do with the woman standing behind her.
My name is Margaret, and I was sixty-nine years old when I first began questioning what was happening inside my granddaughter's home.
Lily was my late daughter Claire's only child.
Before cancer took Claire from us, the three of us had been inseparable. My daughter lived less than twenty minutes away, and there was hardly a week when she didn't stop by with Lily for Sunday dinner, an afternoon of baking, or an excuse to escape the chaos of ordinary family life.
Claire had a quick laugh, a stubborn streak, and a habit of putting everyone else's problems before her own. When she was little, she used to climb into my lap with a book and ask me to read the same story three times. Years later, when she became a mother, she would laugh whenever Lily demanded exactly the same thing.
"See what you started, Mom?" she'd say.
I would smile and tell her that some family traditions deserved to continue.
Claire married Daniel when she was twenty-seven.