I went to the funeral to give you the rabbit, but when I saw you standing next to the caskets, crying, I couldn’t do it. What do you say?
I told myself I’d wait until the hurt wasn’t so fresh. But as time passed, it became harder to keep my promise.
Then you walked into my hospital room.
“Make sure Mr. Bunny gets home to my mommy,”
He hadn’t placed my face at first. But my name and my stories about my family had done the rest.
I should’ve told you then, but I couldn’t. I kept waiting for a perfect moment until my illness made sure there wouldn’t be one. I hid the box and asked Lily to wait a year so you could have time to become a family.
I’m sorry I failed your daughter’s promise.
I folded the letter very carefully, the way you handle something so you don’t throw it.
I failed
Then the grief turned. I felt it happen, the way you feel a car shift gears.
He knew.
He knew who I was every single day. He knew what that rabbit was worth to me. He married me with Mr. Bunny sitting in a box somewhere in the same house.
Then he died and passed the burden of his promise to Lily… someone innocent, and the one person I could never allow my grief and anger to touch in this moment.
Then the grief turned.
Daniel picked the one person on earth I couldn’t be angry at and put the truth in her hands.
Coward. That’s what I thought. Coward.
And there were things I’d never get to ask. Was Josie scared? Did she call for me?
He was gone. There would never be a fight, or an apology I could throw back in his face. Only a rabbit that didn’t even smell like my Josie anymore.
Coward.
“Are you mad at Dad?”
Lily’s voice was tiny. She was sitting on the floor with her knees pulled up.
Could I lie to her? I’d like to tell you I could have. But she deserved honesty, and I was too tired to do anything else.
“Yes,” I said. “I am. But listen to me. None of this is your fault. Not one bit of it.”
Her chin wobbled anyway. And then she asked the question she’d probably been holding for days.
Could I lie to her?
“Are you going to leave me?”
Everything in me stopped.
Here was a child who’d already lost both her parents. Now she’d watched her last person cry over something she’d delivered, and she was doing the math.
“No,” I said. “No, no, no. Come here.”
She climbed into my lap and held my collar in her fists.
“Are you going to leave me?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I told her, over and over, until her breathing slowed.
But I’d be lying if I said my head was quiet. Because I kept seeing that line he’d made her repeat. You still have no idea why he chose you.
And here’s what my mind did with it, and I’m not proud of this.
I thought I finally understood. Daniel knew I was a mother once. He’d seen what happened to my child.
You still have no idea why he chose you.
Maybe he’d looked at a broken woman with an empty space where a daughter used to be and thought, There. That’s who can fill it.
The memories I had of Daniel began to feel different. I no longer knew how much of what I had seen in him was love and how much had been guilt. I hated him a little bit more.
“I think I finally get why your dad chose me,” I said, mostly to myself.
“But he didn’t. That’s what’s weird.”
I hated him a little bit more.
I looked down at her. “What?”
“Dad didn’t choose you.” She said it so plainly. “I did.”
“Lily, sweetheart, I don’t understand.”
She picked at the hem of her sleeve. “It was before you got married. Before Dad even liked you like that. You’d been doing my hair a lot. You sat with me when Dad was too tired. So one night I asked him something.”
“Dad didn’t choose you.”
She glanced up. “I said, ‘Daddy, is this what having a mommy is like?'”
I can’t tell you what those words did to me.
“He asked me what I meant. And I said you knew how I liked my hair. You remembered stuff I told you. You helped when I got scared, and you made sure I had what I needed.” She shrugged, a tiny six-year-old shrug. “And you stayed. You always stayed.”
“What did he say?”
I can’t tell you what those words did to me.
“He asked how I felt about you. And I said I wanted you to keep staying.” She looked straight at me. “I told Dad I wanted you. And he said he wanted you too.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
Something in me loosened.
I had been afraid that Daniel saw a grieving mother and chose me to fill an empty place in Lily’s life.
Something in me loosened.
But Lily had begun choosing me before any of those pieces came together, and I had begun loving her the same way.
Daniel’s secret ran alongside all of it. It never made any of it.
I didn’t forgive Daniel in that kitchen. He had kept Mr. Bunny for years, married me without telling me the truth, and left his daughter to deliver it after he died.
But I no longer had to wonder whether Lily had been handed to me like a consolation prize.
I didn’t forgive Daniel in that kitchen.
She chose me first. And I chose her, every ordinary day after, with every braid.
We sat on the kitchen floor for a long time. The soup went cold.
Eventually Lily reached out and touched the rabbit’s crooked ear.
“Who does he belong to?”
I took a breath. “His name is Mr. Bunny. He belonged to my daughter.”
Lily reached out and touched the rabbit’s crooked ear.
“I know you had a daughter.” She said it carefully. “But I never knew her name.”
“It was Josie.”
Lily whispered it back, testing it. “Josie.”
I told her how Josie carried him everywhere, even into the bathtub, and loved him so hard that his fur wore off.
“But I never knew her name.”
Lily was quiet, leaning on my shoulder.
Then she asked the question she actually needed.
“So… you’re still my mommy?”
“Yes.”
I said the word before she’d finished her sentence.
She melted against me. A moment later she looked at the rabbit again, and her voice went soft.
“So… you’re still my mommy?”
“Will you tell me about Josie?”
So I did. I started with the way Josie sang off-key in the car, and how she wouldn’t eat anything green unless Mr. Bunny went first.
Lily stroked him gently the whole time, like she was comforting him.
He’d come a long way to get here.
But finally, he’d come home, to me, like Josie wanted.
Lily stroked him gently the whole time, like she was comforting him.
