21. Marisol
MARISOL
T he plan is simple: give Isla more room to stand on her own.
That's what Dr. Patel suggested last week — small independent tasks, low stakes, nothing that requires an audience.
Just enough space for Isla to discover she can do things without someone beside her every second.
I've been thinking about it as good practice for the transition.
What I haven't accounted for is that Isla has her own opinion about the plan.
She follows me everywhere.
Not clingy, not anxious — just present. Constant.
Like a small, curly-haired shadow who has decided my orbit is the only one worth occupying.
I ask her to put her shoes by the door while I start breakfast. She puts the shoes by the door and then reappears in the kitchen before I've cracked the first egg.
I send her to pick out her clothes while I fold laundry in the hall.
She picks out her clothes and comes back carrying them, waiting.
"You were supposed to get dressed in your room," I tell her.
"I know," she says, and holds out a striped shirt like I should be impressed she made a selection.
"Isla—"
"I like it better out here."
I look at her. She looks back, perfectly unbothered, perfectly certain. Six years old and already an immovable object when she's decided something.
"Fine," I say. "Go get dressed in the bathroom."
She takes the shirt and goes. I count to four. She comes back.
"I'm done," she announces.
The shirt is on backwards but I decide that's a battle for another morning.
Breakfast is where it goes sideways.
Graham comes down at seven-fifteen in his full armor — dark suit, white shirt, that precise knot in his tie that probably has its own name in some boardroom manual.
He goes to the coffee maker, pours a cup, and turns around to find Isla at the kitchen table with her arms crossed and her oatmeal untouched in front of her.
"Morning," he says to her.
She looks at the oatmeal.
"Isla." He pulls out the chair beside her and sits down, which I know costs him something — the suit, the posture, the whole architecture of him isn't built for kitchen chairs at seven in the morning. "You need to eat."
"Marisol sits with me," she says.
"I'm sitting with you," Graham says.
"Marisol sits on that side." She points at the chair to her left. My chair, apparently. We didn't vote on this. "It's her spot."
I watch Graham absorb this. He's holding his coffee mug in both hands doing the whole processing thing, and I can see him deciding whether to argue the point or let it go.
He lets it go. "Marisol," he says, without turning around. "Apparently there's an assigned seating situation I wasn't briefed on."
"Apparently," I say.
I carry my coffee over and sit in my spot and Isla picks up her spoon immediately, satisfied, like a switch has been flipped.
Graham watches this happen with an expression I'd describe as professionally neutral if I didn't know him well enough by now to see the thing underneath it — not quite wounded, not quite resigned, something more complicated than either.
"She did that yesterday too," I tell him, low. "It'll even out."
"I know," he says. And he does know, that's the thing. He's come far enough to know. He just doesn't like it, which is different.
The parenting question comes after Isla goes to brush her teeth.
"Dr. Patel's office called," Graham says. He's rinsing his mug at the sink, not looking at me. "They want to move her Thursday session to Friday. I wasn't sure whether to approve the change."
"What did you think?"
"I asked you."
"I know you asked me. I'm asking what you thought first."
He turns around. There's where I can see him recalibrating, trying to figure out if this is a test, and I hold my face neutral because it isn't a test, it's just the answer.
He needs to stop outsourcing these calls to me.
Not because I mind — I don't — but because one day I won't be the person standing at this counter, and the habit he's building right now matters.
"Friday is her school show-and-tell," he says, slowly. "She's been talking about it. I'd want to keep that intact."
"Then you have your answer."
"So I tell them Thursday stays."
"You tell them Thursday stays," I say. "You knew that before you asked me."
He studies me for a moment. Not annoyed — something closer to recognizing a thing he doesn't love about himself. "I've been doing that."
"A little."
"It's a hard habit to break when the other person is usually right."
"Flattery noted," I say. "Call them back."
He does. Right there, standing at the kitchen counter, one hand in his pocket, telling the scheduler Thursday works and Friday doesn't. Clean, direct, decided.
Isla comes back in with toothpaste on her chin before he's hung up, and he wipes it off with his thumb without pausing the call, and she tolerates this indignity with the grace of someone who's used to it now.
I look away before he catches me looking.
Bedtime is the full reversal of this morning.
Isla wants me. Only me. She's had Graham do bedtime twice this week and tonight she's decided the rotation is over, presented as fact, non-negotiable, delivered while she's already in her star pajamas with Gerald under her arm.
"You do it," she tells me, at my doorway.
"Graham can?—"
"You," she says.
Graham appears in his rolled sleeves, having clearly had the same idea. He holds up one hand in a small, clean gesture — go ahead — and retreats back toward his office without making it a thing.
I read to Isla for twenty minutes. She corrects me on Bertie's voice because apparently the voice is now institutional, and somewhere around the second book her grip on Gerald loosens and her breathing goes long and even.
I sit there a minute after. The nightlight does its pale yellow thing. Outside her window the city makes its city noises, and in here it's just quiet, and her tangled strands are fanned out against the pillow, and she looks like something precious someone trusted me with.
The light under Graham's office door glows at the far end of the hall. I can hear, faintly, the sound of him typing.
I go to my room. I close the door. I look at my hands and think about the word temporary and how it fits less and less in my mouth every time I try to say it.
Then I get under the covers and I don't think about the light under his door.
I try very hard not to think about it.