"Grace," Celeste began. "I should have said this twelve years ago. I was wrong. Richard was cruel, and I let him be cruel while I sat there pretending that silence meant I wasn't involved. I'm sorry for what we did to you. I'm sorry I let you leave that house thinking none of us could see your worth."
Grace looked at her without speaking. She remembered the Thanksgiving table vividly: the silver candlesticks, Richard's cold questions, and Celeste's lowered eyes. She had made peace long ago with never receiving this apology, but that did not mean the old memory had lost its ability to sting. She wanted to be sure Celeste understood what she had actually done, not simply how much she regretted missing the twins' childhood.
"I was a guest in your home," Grace said. "I tried to be kind. I brought you a pie, and by the end of the night your husband had asked Daniel to choose between you and me. You knew that was wrong."
"I did," Celeste whispered. "I knew."
"And you let him walk out."
"Yes."
Grace held her gaze for another moment. Then she stepped aside, not because the past had been resolved, but because an honest admission deserved the possibility of a next sentence. "You're here now," she said. "Let's start there. Come in. The girls have been watching the window."
Celeste crossed the threshold with visible hesitation. The yellow house was warm, bright, and crowded with life, completely different from the formal rooms in which she had raised Daniel. Children's drawings covered one wall of the hallway. Shoes lay by the front mat, Biscuit sniffed at her hem, and somewhere a small boy was announcing that he had eaten three pieces of pizza and intended to eat four.
Pearl appeared first. She ran down the hall and stopped a few steps away, suddenly shy. "You came," she said, staring at Celeste's neck. "You wore your necklace."
"I did," Celeste answered. "I thought you might want to see it again."
Ruby arrived more cautiously, her arms crossed but her curiosity plainly winning an argument with her distrust. She glanced at the photo album and asked what was in it. Celeste lowered herself onto the living-room rug and opened the cover, revealing an old photograph of a chubby baby sitting in a bathtub full of bubbles.
"That's your daddy," she said. "When he was about one."
Ruby stared at it. Then she burst into such helpless laughter that she had to sit down beside her sister. "Daddy!" she shouted. "You were a giant baby!"
Daniel came into the room holding a stack of paper plates. "I see we're already reviewing the evidence against me," he said, looking down at the photograph. "I object to that one. I was an extremely dignified infant."
"You had no hair!" Pearl exclaimed.
"I was saving it for later," Daniel replied. Ruby laughed again, and Celeste found herself laughing, too, not because the moment repaired twelve years of absence but because it reminded her how much ordinary happiness she had voluntarily missed. She turned the page and found another photograph of Daniel wearing a pirate costume, his expression furious because the hat covered his ears.