I stared at her.
Of all the things I expected, that wasn’t one of them.
“A break?”
“I have been overwhelmed. Miles barely sleeps. Everything has been nonstop. I was supposed to be gone a few minutes.”
“Seventeen.”
She looked at me.
“What?”
“You told Tessa seventeen minutes. Not a few minutes. Seventeen.”
Her mouth opened, then closed.
I continued before she could reshape it.
“And you left before lunch.”
“I lost track of time.”
“You told our nine-year-old not to call me.”
“I told her to call if something was wrong.”
“Something was wrong the second an elementary-school kid became responsible for an infant without another adult in the house.”
She flinched at that, but I wasn’t trying to win an argument.
I was trying to understand how a person could walk out the door, keep walking, and somehow make a child believe the dangerous part was disappointing her mother.
