Just the two of us, in Dad’s kitchen. Dad took Ethan out to a hardware store so they’d be out of the house. I think it was Dad’s idea. I didn’t ask.

We made chocolate chip with too many chocolate chips. Lily stood on a stepstool at the counter in a tiny apron that said GRANDPA’S LITTLE HELPER. She got flour everywhere, on the counter, on the floor, in her hair, and in mine.

While we waited for the first batch to bake, she sat on the counter swinging her legs and told me about her mom.

“Mommy liked yellow,” she said. “Everything was yellow. Her car was yellow. Our kitchen in Indianapolis was yellow. She had yellow rain boots.”

“That sounds really nice.”

“She made pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse.” Lily looked down at her hands. “Daddy tries, but his look like potatoes.”

I laughed.

“He burns one side, too,” I said. “Every time.”

“Every time!” Lily said, delighted. “You know that?”

“I’ve eaten his pancakes every Sunday for six years.”

Lily looked at me with her big brown eyes.

“Every Sunday?” she said. “Daddy comes here every Saturday. And then on Sunday he leaves really early.” She frowned. “Was that because of you? Because he had to go make you pancakes?”

My chest hurt.

“Yeah, sweetheart,” I said. “I think it was.”

Lily thought about that for a long time.

“So he was making pancakes for both of us,” she said slowly. “Just not together.”

“Just not together,” I said.

The oven timer beeped. Lily jumped off the counter.

“Cookies!”

That night, I finally called my father back.

He picked up on the first ring.

“Claire.”

“Hi, Dad.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. I could hear him breathing.

“I’m so sorry, kiddo,” he said finally. His voice was thick. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“I know, Dad.”

“I’ve been sitting here every night thinking about your mother,” he said. “What she’d say to me if she knew. She’d have my head on a platter.”

I laughed a little. “She would.”

“She always said I was a terrible liar. Remember? She said I couldn’t keep a secret about a birthday present for five minutes.” He laughed too, but it was a sad laugh. “And then I went and kept the biggest secret of my life from you. For three years.”

“Why, Dad? Really, why?”

He was quiet.

“Because when your mother got sick,” he said slowly, “I didn’t tell you how bad it was. Not until the very end. You were sixteen. I thought I was protecting you.” He took a breath. “And you never forgave me for that. Not really. You told me once you wished you’d known sooner, so you could have said goodbye properly.”

I closed my eyes. I remembered saying that. I was nineteen. We were standing at her grave.

“I swore I’d never do that to you again,” Dad said. “And then I did exactly the same thing. Because I’m a coward too, kiddo. I can’t stand watching my girls hurt. I’ll do anything to stop it. Even when the anything is worse.”

I sat on Sarah’s couch with Pickles in my lap and cried.

“Dad,” I said. “I’m not sixteen anymore.”

“I know, honey.”

“I’m thirty-five. You have to let me get hurt sometimes. You have to let me handle things.”

“I know,” Dad said. “I know. I’m going to try. I promise I’m going to try.”

Ethan and I met for the first time on a Tuesday evening, at the end of the third week.

I picked the place. Not our Italian restaurant. Not Paolo. I picked a little coffee shop near Sarah’s apartment that neither of us had ever been to. I didn’t want anything that had memories in it.

He was already there when I walked in, sitting at a table in the back. He’d lost weight. He hadn’t shaved in a few days. He stood up when he saw me, then didn’t know what to do with his hands, then sat back down.

I sat down across from him.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“Thank you for coming.”

“I’m not here to get back together,” I said. “I want you to know that. I’m here because Lily asked me to talk to you.”

He winced. “She did?”

“She called me again yesterday. She said, ‘Claire, please talk to Daddy. He’s so sad he burned the potatoes.’”

Ethan put his hand over his eyes. He laughed, and it was half a sob.

“He did burn the potatoes,” he said. “Really badly. The smoke alarm went off.”

We talked for three hours.

Really talked. For the first time in three years.

He told me about Megan. How she’d been so tired at the end, but she’d still made Lily’s lunches every day. How she’d made Ethan promise to braid Lily’s hair the way she liked it, and he’d watched YouTube videos for a week to learn. How Megan had made him promise, in the hospital, two days before she died, to tell me.

“She said, ‘Ethan, you can’t raise my daughter with a secret,’” he said. “‘Kids always find out. Always. And then they think they were the secret.’” He looked down at his coffee. “She was right. Lily asked me if I was ashamed of her. That’s exactly what Megan said would happen.”

“Why didn’t you just do it, Ethan? After she died? Forget what Dad said. Why didn’t you just tell me?”

He was quiet for a long time.

“Because every day I didn’t tell you made it harder to tell you the next day,” he said. “That’s how lies work. You think you’re just waiting for the right moment. But every day you wait, the lie gets bigger. And then it’s not just ‘I have a daughter.’ It’s ‘I have a daughter and I’ve been lying to you for a year.’ Then two years. Then three.” He shook his head. “By the end, I was more afraid of you finding out how long I’d lied than of you finding out about Lily.”

“That’s exactly what happened,” I said. “That’s exactly what I’m angry about. Not Lily. I could never be angry about Lily. The lying.”

“I know.”

“You made me think I wasn’t worth marrying, Ethan.”

“I know,” he said. His eyes filled up. “I know I did. I’ll never forgive myself for that.”

“Did you really buy a ring?” I asked him.

He nodded slowly.

“Two and a half years ago,” he said. “Right after the custody stuff with Megan’s sister got settled. I thought, okay, now. Now I’ll tell her everything, and then I’ll ask her. I went to the jeweler on Lake Street and picked it out. I told Robert. I said, ‘This weekend, I’m telling her.’”

“And Dad said not yet.”

“Robert said not yet,” Ethan said. “You’d just gotten promoted at work. You were so happy. He said, ‘Let her have this. Just for a few weeks.’” Ethan laughed bitterly. “The ring’s been in my sock drawer ever since. Every time you asked me about marriage, I’d go to bed and think about it in there. Right under your nose. Behind my running socks.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m not asking you for anything, Claire,” he said quietly. “I’m not asking you to come back. I’m not asking you to forgive me. I just want you to know the truth. All of it. No more secrets. That’s all.”

I looked at him across the table for a long time.

“No more secrets,” I said.

“None,” he said. “I promise. Ever again. If I’m scared, I’ll tell you I’m scared. If something’s wrong, I’ll tell you. Even if it’s going to hurt.”

“Even if it’s going to hurt,” I repeated.

“Especially then,” Ethan said.

I didn’t move back that night.

Or the next week.

It took two more months.

During those two months, I saw Lily every Saturday. We made cookies. We went to the zoo. We went to the library and checked out every horse book in the children’s section. I learned that she was afraid of the dark and liked her nightlight shaped like a moon. I learned that she hated socks with seams. I learned that she missed her mother most at bedtime, and that if you sang her the song from the yellow kitchen in Indianapolis, the one Megan used to sing, she’d fall asleep in five minutes.

Ethan taught me the song. It was “You Are My Sunshine.”

I sang it to her the first time on a Saturday night in November. She fell asleep in four minutes.

When I came downstairs, Ethan and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table. Both of them were crying.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t you dare. Both of you.”

They wiped their eyes. They didn’t stop.

Ethan and I started going to counseling together.

It was a woman named Dr. Okonkwo, in an office over a bakery downtown. The whole room smelled like cinnamon rolls. Every week, we sat on her gray couch and talked about trust and lies and fear. Mostly fear.

“Ethan,” Dr. Okonkwo said in our third session. “What were you most afraid of? When Megan first called?”

He thought about it for a long time.

“That Claire would leave,” he said. “That she’d look at Lily and see everything she couldn’t have. That she’d hate me for having it.”

Dr. Okonkwo turned to me.

“Claire? Is that what happened?”

I thought about Lily on the bottom stair in her horse pajamas, clutching Ruby. Are you leaving because of me?

“No,” I said. “That’s not what happened at all.”

“What happened?” Dr. Okonkwo asked.

“I looked at Lily,” I said slowly, “and I saw a little girl who’d lost her mother and was scared nobody wanted her. And I thought, I know exactly what that feels like. I was sixteen once.” I swallowed. “I didn’t see what I couldn’t have. I saw somebody who needed someone.”

Ethan was crying again. He cried a lot those days.

So did I.

I moved back in the first week of December.

Not just me.

Lily too.

We’d talked about it for weeks. Me and Ethan and Dad and Dr. Okonkwo and Lily. Especially Lily. We asked her what she wanted. She thought about it very seriously for two whole days.

“Can Grandpa still pick me up from school on Wednesdays?” she asked.

“Yes,” Dad said.

“And can I sleep over at Grandpa’s on Friday nights?”

“Yes.”

“And can Ruby come?”

“Ruby definitely has to come,” I said.

“Okay,” Lily said. “Then yes.”

We turned the little office at the end of the hall in our townhouse into her bedroom. Ethan and I painted it yellow. Megan’s yellow. Lily picked the exact shade from a hundred paint samples at the hardware store. It was called Buttercup Morning.

We hung her horse drawings on the walls. We put her moon nightlight in the outlet by her bed. We put a photograph of Megan on her nightstand, in a yellow frame. Megan in her yellow rain boots, holding a baby Lily, both of them laughing.

The first night Lily slept there, she came into our bedroom at two in the morning and climbed into bed between us.

“Bad dream,” she mumbled.

“Okay, bug,” Ethan said, half asleep.

She curled up between us and fell asleep in about thirty seconds.

I lay there in the dark, listening to the two of them breathe. Ethan on one side. Lily in the middle.

For six years, I’d thought I was waiting for something that might never come.

It turned out it had been there the whole time. On Saturdays. Behind a fake friend named Walter. In my father’s house, in my old bedroom, with a moon nightlight.

I’d just never been allowed to see it.

Christmas Eve came.

We spent it at Dad’s house, the way we always did. Jenna and Mike came, along with Mike’s parents. Jenna’s wedding was set for June. She’d asked Lily to be the flower girl. Lily had practiced throwing petals in Dad’s hallway every Friday night since October.

Before dinner, we did the ugly sweater exchange.

It’s a family thing now, not just Ethan and me. Everybody has to bring one. Jenna got Dad a sweater with a turkey wearing sunglasses. Dad got Mike one with a flamingo in a Santa hat.

I’d gotten Lily one with a horse on it. A purple horse wearing reindeer antlers, with real jingle bells sewn onto the antlers. She shrieked when she opened it and put it on immediately over her dress.

Then it was Ethan’s turn to give me mine.

He handed me a box wrapped in newspaper. He always wraps things in newspaper. He says it’s environmental. I know it’s because he can never find the tape.

I tore it open.

Inside was the ugliest sweater I’d ever seen. It was bright green and enormous, with a lumpy snowman knitted on the front. The snowman was cross-eyed. He had a carrot nose that was sewn on crooked and a little black top hat.

“Oh my God,” I said. “Ethan. This is horrible.”

“Thank you,” he said proudly.

“Where did you even find this?”

“Lily helped me pick it,” he said. “We went to six stores.”

“Seven,” Lily said from the floor, jingling. “Daddy forgot the one by the dentist.”

I held the sweater up. Everyone laughed. Dad took a picture.

“Put it on!” Lily said. “You have to put it on! It’s the rules!”

So I pulled it over my head.

That’s when I felt something in the pocket.

There was a little pocket on the front of the sweater, right on the snowman’s belly, like a kangaroo pouch. I hadn’t noticed it before.

There was something small and hard in it.

I looked at Ethan.

He wasn’t laughing anymore. He was looking at me very seriously. His hands were shaking.

I looked at Lily. She’d stopped jingling. She had both hands pressed over her mouth, and her eyes were enormous.

I looked at Dad. He was holding his camera, but he’d lowered it. He was crying. Of course he was crying.

I reached into the snowman’s pocket.

It was a ring box. A small dark blue velvet one.

Ethan got down on one knee on my father’s living room rug. It was the same rug Mike had knocked a wine glass over a year ago.

“Claire,” he said. His voice was shaking. “I bought this ring two and a half years ago. It’s been sitting in my sock drawer behind my running socks this whole time. I’m not going to pretend that’s okay. It’s not. It should have been on your finger a long time ago.”

He took a breath.

“I don’t have any secrets left,” he said. “None. You know everything. You know I was a coward. You know I lied to you. You know I let Megan’s calls go to voicemail. You know the worst things about me. And you came back anyway.”

He opened the ring box. It was a simple silver band with one small diamond. Nothing fancy. Exactly what I would have picked.

“I’m not asking you to marry the man I pretended to be,” Ethan said. “I’m asking you to marry the man I actually am. Who burns pancakes on one side. Who’s scared a lot. Who’s going to tell you every single time he’s scared, for the rest of our lives.”

He looked over at Lily on the floor in her jingling horse sweater.

“Lily?” he said. “Do you want to ask her too? Like we practiced?”

Lily jumped up. She ran over and stood next to her dad. She took a deep breath.

“Claire,” she said very seriously. “Will you marry us?”

I couldn’t speak.

I looked at the two of them, Ethan on one knee and Lily standing beside him in her purple horse sweater with jingle bells on the antlers. Both of them had the same brown eyes and the same dimple on the left side. Both were waiting.

I knelt down on the rug in front of them.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Both of you. Yes.”

Lily screamed. She threw her arms around my neck so hard she knocked me over backward onto the rug. Ethan fell on top of both of us, laughing and crying. The jingle bells on Lily’s antlers went crazy.

Dad took about four hundred pictures.

Jenna was screaming. Mike was clapping. Mike’s mother was crying into a napkin.

And somewhere underneath all of it, lying on my back on my father’s living room rug with my soon-to-be husband and my soon-to-be daughter piled on top of me, I started laughing. I couldn’t stop.

We got married in March.

At City Hall, on a Tuesday, exactly the way I’d always said I wanted. Dad walked me in. Jenna and Sarah were my witnesses. Lily was the flower girl. She’d been practicing for Jenna’s wedding anyway, so she was ready. She threw rose petals all over the clerk’s office floor, and the clerk didn’t even mind.

Lily wore her yellow dress. She insisted. “Mommy would want yellow,” she said.

I wore a simple white dress I bought at a department store. Ethan wore his good suit.

Under his suit jacket, he wore the reindeer sweater. The one with the nose that plays “Jingle Bells.”

He pressed it right after we said I do.

The clerk laughed so hard she had to sit down.

Afterward, we went to dinner at our Italian restaurant on Fifth Street. All of us. Dad and Jenna and Mike and Sarah and Lily and Ethan and me.

Paolo came over to the table. He looked at Lily in her yellow dress. He looked at the ring on my hand. He looked at Ethan’s reindeer sweater.

“So,” he said. “Three spaghetti carbonara, one with no pepper, and what does the young lady want?”

“Pasta with butter,” Lily said. “Please. And extra cheese. And can I have a Shirley Temple with two cherries?”

Paolo wrote it all down very seriously.

“Two cherries,” he said. “For a special day.”

He winked at me.

Sunday mornings are different now.

Ethan still makes pancakes, still too big, still burned on one side. But now he makes them shaped like Mickey Mouse. Lily taught him. They look like potatoes with ears. She says that’s how her mom’s used to look at the beginning, too.

Lily sits at the kitchen table in her pajamas with Ruby propped up next to her plate. I drink my coffee. Ethan flips pancakes and gets batter on the ceiling.

“Daddy,” Lily said last Sunday, with her mouth full, “you burned the side again.”

“I always burn the side.”

“I know,” Lily said. “That’s how I know they’re yours.”

Ethan looked at me across the kitchen.

I looked back at him.

For six years, he made pancakes for two people who never got to sit at the same table.

Now we do.