September 23, Wednesday
LILY WAS already talking when the call connected, the way she'd been lately, as if she'd been rehearsing her opening line before I ever picked up.
"She rearranged the pantry, Mom. She rearranged the pantry. Like she owns it."
"Heidi did?"
"Who else would I be talking about?" Lily's voice cracked with something sharper than sarcasm. "She put all her weird protein powders where your baking stuff used to be. I couldn't even find the Pop-Tarts this morning."
"I'm sorry," I said, because there wasn't much else to say that wouldn't sound like an excuse. "I'll talk to your dad about it."
"Talk to him? He's the one who let her in in the first place. You just—" she gestured vaguely at the screen, at me, at the whole situation, "—signed off on it. Like it was nothing."
Josh sat beside her on the couch, hunched into himself, working at his thumbnail with a focus that had become its own kind of language over the past few weeks. I wanted to reach through the screen and pull his hand away from his mouth.
"Josh, how's soccer going?" I asked, grabbing for solid ground. "Are you starting this week?"
He shrugged, eyes fixed somewhere near his knees.
"Honey, talk to me. Even a little."
Nothing. Just the small, worrying motion of his jaw.
I turned back to Lily, trying again, softer this time. "How's cheer? Did you get your competition schedule yet?"
That was the wrong question, or maybe there was no right one left.
Lily's face contorted, and before I fully registered what was happening, something small and hard—a phone case, I realized a beat too late—came flying at the camera.
The picture jolted, tilted, caught the ceiling for a second before someone, presumably Josh, righted it.
"I hate you," Lily said, the words landing flat and absolute. "I actually hate you right now."
She was gone before I could answer, her footsteps loud even through the tinny laptop speaker, a door somewhere slamming hard enough that the sound crackled.
Josh sat alone in the frame for a moment, still picking at his nail, not looking at the camera.
"I don't hate you," he said quietly, like it was a confession he hadn't meant to make.
Then he stood too, and walked out of frame without another word, leaving nothing behind but an empty couch and the soft, oblivious hum of a television playing in another room.
I sat there a long time after the call disconnected on its own, staring at the dark rectangle where my children's faces had been. Deputy Wells said nothing from his post by the door, and I was grateful, in that moment, for his silence more than I'd ever been grateful for anything he'd said.
I thought about Lily's face right before she'd thrown whatever it was—not fury, exactly, but something closer to grief.
I thought about Josh's ragged thumbnail, the words he could no longer find, the ones he'd finally managed—I don't hate you—offered like a small, fragile gift he wasn't sure I deserved.
I had wanted, when this began, to believe I was doing something important.
Something that mattered beyond the walls of my own house.
And maybe I still was. But sitting there in the wreckage of a five-minute phone call, I couldn't locate a version of "important" that made this hurt feel like it belonged to a good story instead of a mistake I couldn't undo.