As much as she knew he didn’t want to, a part of Silas blamed her nonetheless. If Lily hadn’t gone for that late-night walk and seen Philip, he could’ve gotten off. Whatever forensic evidence hadn’t been washed away by the lake was circumstantial. It could’ve been deemed an accident. But Evan and Rose never blamed her. She cried on their kitchen floor the day the detectives called her in for questioning, begging them to tell her what to do. Rose and Evan could have told her to lie. She was carrying their grandson; they were her family now. They could’ve told her to take the fall herself, and she just might have. But they didn’t. They told her to tell the truth. Rose held her in her arms in a way her own mother never had, stroked her hair, and called her “sweet girl.”

I’m so sorry, sweet girl.

Then Sean was born and present and in need of things daily, hourly, by the minute, and Silas, Evan, and Rose shifted everything to be about The Baby. After a while, the attention went from strained to genuine to genuinely normal. Silas was in awe of their son. He was always bouncing him in his arms, pointing at people and buildings and colors. Look, Sean! Garbage truck! Look, Sean, dog! Look, Sean, look. See? It’s all for you. As soon as Silas came back to her, Lily forgot that he had ever left. And she could’ve gone on forgetting. She could’ve stayed in that twilight state, a shade so close to happiness, it could have been mistaken as such, if not for the real thing for comparison.

If not for Gavin Kelly.

No one could call Silas a bad husband. She knew it almost because the marriage had never been happy, exactly, but he kept showing up anyway. Magazines and her mother taught her she should be grateful if a man stuck around for the taxing grind of normal. The part of marriage that is about cleaning the kitchen floor as opposed to fucking on it. As if the female gender were not equally capable of getting bored, of longing for the excitement brought by strange hands. But gratitude is not love, especially when the person dutifully practicing gratitude feels, fundamentally, that it is wrong to be grateful to someone for doing that which they vowed to do. That gratitude should be reserved for moments of awe, moments in which one doesn’t have to decide to be grateful but rather falls, blindly and without thought, to one’s knees.