Page 166 of The Forbidden Center

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were.”

“I was.”

She laughs once into my shirt and it goes through my whole chest.

She falls asleep first, on the side nearest the door. She has slept on that side since the first night, and I’ve been telling myself it was so she could hear Tova.

I put my hand flat on her back and leave it there.

I can’t put the money back.

So I will have to be here long enough that she stops needing it.

Chapter thirty-one

Astrid

The art show is on a Tuesday afternoon.

For years, Tuesday afternoons have been a treatment room. I have missed a winter concert, two class presentations, and whatever happened in the fourth grade that Tova still refers to as the pumpkin thing.

Today I am here because I am not permitted to work.

I put that down where I put the rest of it and go inside.

The hallway outside the gymnasium has been hung with student work on black paper. There is a coffee urn, a stack of paper cups, and a plate of supermarket cookies that nobody has arranged.

Tova’s is in the second row, between a watercolor of a horse and something involving a great deal of glitter.

She has drawn the inside of my truck.

The dashboard. The dent in the glove box. The air vent. A hand on the wheel at the bottom edge of the page, cut off at the wrist.

I look at it for longer than the horse requires.

“You’re Tova’s mother.”

“Yes.”

She has a paper cup in each hand. “Kaitlyn’s. We met at the open house.”

“I was not at the open house.”

“No. That’s right.”

Another woman comes over and takes one of the cups. Her lanyard says BRANTLEY.

I have read that name once before, on a suspension form, on the line above my daughter’s.

Neither of them offers me the other, which I decide not to find interesting.

“You’re married to Colt Riley.”

“I am.”

“We were all surprised.”