“You’re our mom and our dad,” Claire told me once, when she was seven. “So you have to come to both.”
For twenty-one years, Vanessa never called.
Not on Christmas morning. Not on a single birthday. Not when Claire fell off the monkey bars at eleven and snapped her arm in two places. Not when Sophie won a full scholarship. Not when Emma walked across the stage as valedictorian and searched the crowd, just for a second, for a face she had never seen.
Nothing. Not a card. Not a word.
I stopped waiting for her somewhere around the girls’ third birthday. The anger I kept much longer. It turned out to be useful. Anger can get a man out of bed when love alone is too tired.
