Chapter 9 - YOU SAID SHE'D ADJUST.
Daniel had seen the revised schedule before the wedding.
He said it while standing beside the truck, with Emily's boxes between them and Vanessa's front door still in view. Andrew waited for the qualification. Daniel supplied it quickly.
“I didn't know anything about a locked room.”
“What did you know?”
“Vanessa said Emily might not walk. That she was nervous and they were changing things.”
“When?”
“That morning.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
Daniel slid his keys through his fingers. “I thought you knew.”
“Did you ask?”
“No.”
Andrew looked at the box containing the stuffed dog. Its remaining ear stuck out beneath the folded flaps.
“Did she ask you not to tell me?”
“No. She said not to make it a big discussion right before the ceremony.”
“And that sounded different to you?”
Daniel winced. “At the time.”
They drove back with the radio off. Andrew wasn't ready to decide whether this made Daniel a knowing enabler or a friend who had taken the easy interpretation. He knew only that Daniel had helped keep a relevant fact from him and then suggested they finish the ceremony after Emily was found.
Those choices belonged together, even if they did not amount to a plot.
At the apartment, Daniel helped carry everything upstairs. He offered to assemble the remaining furniture. Andrew thanked him and said he could handle it.
“Are we okay?” Daniel asked.
“Not today.”
The answer seemed to hurt more than an argument would have. Andrew let it stand.
When Emily returned from school, she went through her boxes without much excitement. She hugged the stuffed dog, checked the missing ear, and set it on her bed. Then she found her sneakers.
“You brought them.”
“Of course.”
She turned one over. The sole had begun to peel near the toe.
“I know they're old.”
“We'll replace them when we need to. You can still like them.”
“Vanessa said they made me look like nobody looked after me.”
Andrew stayed quiet.
Emily immediately added, “She got me new ones.”
It was the speed of the defense that got him. She had learned to place the gift beside the hurt, as if the two canceled each other out and she needed to make sure he did the math correctly.
“Did that upset you?”
“A little.”
“I'm sorry.”
“You said she was trying to help.”
He remembered the drive home after the shoe shopping. Emily in the back seat, quiet. Vanessa explaining that Emily was resistant to new things. Andrew saying she would adjust.
He had not asked what had happened in the store.
“I did,” he said.
Emily waited for the but. He could see it in the way she held the sneaker.
“I should have asked you.”
“You were driving.”
“I could have asked when we got home.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. “I thought if I didn't like her stuff, you couldn't marry her.”
Andrew pulled out the desk chair and sat. “Liking somebody's gifts isn't your job.”
“But you liked her.”
“Yes.”
“And you wanted me to.”
He took a breath. “Yes.”
There was no answer that made him look better without making her experience less true. He had wanted the easy shape: the woman he loved, the daughter he loved, a bigger house, everybody grateful for the same future. When the fit had been awkward, he had treated Emily's discomfort as something time would fix.
“I'm sorry I made that feel like a job,” he said.
She looked down at the shoe. “Can we glue it?”
Before they got up, Andrew asked whether there were other belongings she wanted from Vanessa's house. Emily named a library bookmark, then said it probably didn't matter. He wrote it on the collection list anyway. She added a drawing folded inside a cookbook and a pencil sharpener shaped like a frog.
“Those aren't expensive,” she said.
“They don't have to be.”
He read the list back. Emily corrected the bookmark's color and told him which cookbook held the drawing. By the time they finished, she was giving directions with the impatience of someone explaining obvious things to a slow assistant. He preferred that to the careful permission-seeking voice she had used since Saturday. The list also kept him honest: he could not decide that recovering his work papers mattered while a cheap frog could be replaced. He put the paper beside his keys so the next trip would include what she had actually asked for.
“We can try.”
They went to the kitchen and found adhesive in a moving box. The directions required a clamp they didn't have, so they used two heavy books and a folded towel. Emily wrote DO NOT MOVE on a scrap of paper and put it beside the arrangement.
The repair might last a week or a month. It didn't matter much. She had named something she wanted, and he was helping without making her defend the cost of wanting it.
While the glue dried, she asked whether Vanessa would come to the apartment.
“Not without us agreeing to it.”
“You and her?”
“You and me would talk first.”
“What if I said no?”
“Then she wouldn't come here.”
Emily pressed the cap back onto the glue. “Okay.”
Later, Andrew called the school counselor and asked for a private conversation about supporting Emily after a distressing family event. He didn't ask for a diagnosis. He didn't need one to justify paying attention. He wanted guidance about listening without repeatedly questioning her and about keeping adult conflict away from school.
The counselor offered a time the following afternoon.
After the call, he found an old text thread from the week of the shoe shopping. He searched his own messages, not Emily's. Vanessa had written that the girl was struggling with change.
Andrew's reply appeared beneath it.
She'll adjust. Don't let her run the show.
He sat with the phone in his hand for a long time. There was no ambiguity about who had written that sentence.
Then another message arrived from Daniel.
May you like
Vanessa showed me this when she said you were okay with changing Emily's role.
Attached was a screenshot of Andrew's own words.
