A reporter asked if Grant denied it. He looked around helplessly and said he had only been trying to protect everyone.
I stood beside Tara. “You protected your reputation,” I said. “You destroyed our lives.”
Later, Tara came home with me. I opened the cedar box I had kept for twenty years. Inside were her ribbons, her little red shoes, a pancake recipe card, and old missing posters softened at the edges.
“I kept what I could,” I told her. “Proof that you were loved.”
The next morning, I made pancakes. The first one burned, the second one tore, but by the third, Tara walked into the kitchen wearing my old sweater.
“I’m not ready to call you Mom,” she said quietly.
The words hurt, but they were honest.
“Then call me Cassidy,” I said. “That’s enough for me.”
