Vanessa laughed, but it sounded thin and weak. “Oh my God, Daniel, she’s twisting everything. We were joking.”
“I wasn’t joking,” I said. “And neither were you.”
Daniel set the folder down on the entry table. “Vanessa,” he said, “tell me she’s lying.”
She crossed her arms. “Daniel, your mother has hated me from the start. She’s dramatic, and she’s trying to turn you against me because she can’t stand that your life doesn’t revolve around her anymore.”
That was the wrong thing to say.
Daniel turned fully toward her. “You made my seventy-eight-year-old mother get on the floor?”
Vanessa opened her mouth, then shut it. For the first time since I had known her, she had no smooth answer ready. Daniel looked at the muddy footprints, the towel, my red eyes, and the dent in the sofa cushion where she had been sitting like royalty being served.
“I came back because I forgot your garment bag,” he said slowly. “And I heard you from the porch.”
The color drained from Vanessa’s face.
Daniel took a breath, then another, as though he were holding back years of denial. “So this is who you are when I’m not here.”
Vanessa tried to recover, as she always did. She stepped closer and softened her tone, reaching for his arm. “Baby, listen to me. It wasn’t like that. We were both upset, and your mother is leaving out what she said first.”
Daniel pulled his arm away.
“No,” he said. “Do not call me baby. Not now.”
I had not heard that voice from him since he was younger, in his first courtroom job, firm and sharp and impossible to interrupt. Vanessa heard it too. She straightened and dropped the sweet act completely.
“Fine,” she snapped. “You want the truth? Your mother has been impossible. She judges everything. She acts like I do not belong here.”
Daniel’s jaw tightened. “Because you do not belong he
