She was worried that she had done something wrong by being found.
“Did she say anything about what would happen if you came out?”
Hannah looked at the floor.
“She said if I came out and made everybody look at me, you’d be embarrassed.
And then you’d have to choose.” She said the next part very fast, the way children do with the thing they’ve been holding.
“And she said you’d choose her, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you get married, and then it would be my fault that you were sad about it.”
I crouched down in that corridor.
“Hannah.
I want you to listen to me and I want you to remember this when you’re twenty.”
She nodded.
“There is no version of my life where I choose somebody over you.
Not this one.
Not a future one.
Not when you’re grown up and living somewhere else.
That is not a thing that is available.
Do you understand me?”
“But you love her.”
“I did love her,” I said, and I heard the tense come out of my own mouth and so did she.
Samantha came around the corner from the kitchen at that point and stopped dead.
She looked at the two of us — me on one knee in a dress uniform in a service corridor, Hannah with her basket, petals on the floor — and my sister’s face went through about four things in a second and a half and landed somewhere I had never seen it.
“Where was she,” Samantha said.
“Laundry room.”
“Who put her there.”
I stood up.
