Caroline lifted it carefully.
“It belonged to Frank.”
“No. His is at my house.”
“He had two, dear,” she said.
A photograph rested beneath the cutters.
Caroline picked it up and handed it to me.
A little girl stood beside a kitchen table, smiling over a plate of star-shaped apple pancakes.
“It belonged to Frank.”
She looked about five years old.
Frank stood behind her.
He was younger. Thinner. And happy in a way I had never seen.
“Who is she?”
Caroline’s voice shook.
“Her name was Miley.”
The room seemed to narrow around that name.
“Her name was Miley.”
“Frank was married before he met your mother,” Caroline revealed. “Miley was his daughter.”
I gripped the photograph by its edges.
“Where is she?”
Caroline’s eyes lowered.
“She died when she was five.”
The words landed softly, which made them hurt more.
“She died when she was five.”
“There was an accident at a lake. It happened quickly. Frank blamed himself even though there was nothing he could have done.”
I sat down because my legs would no longer hold me.
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
“After Miley died, his marriage collapsed,” Caroline said. “He stopped speaking to people. He stopped answering my calls. We were best friends. He packed away every photograph, every toy, every reminder that he had ever been a father.”
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
My eyes returned to the little star cutter.
“The pancakes.”
“He made them for Miley.”
Caroline sat across from me.
“Then one morning, after he married your mother, you climbed into his lap and fell asleep against his chest. When you woke up, you asked whether he knew how to make pancakes shaped like stars.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“He made them for Miley.”
“You were four.”
Caroline placed the cutter on the table.
“He called me that afternoon. He was crying so hard I could barely understand him. He said he had made the pancakes. He said he had spoken Miley’s name aloud for the first time in years and had not fallen apart.”
My fingers closed around the edge of the table.
“He did not give you something that belonged to his daughter,” Caroline added. “You gave him a way to remember her without believing the memory would kill him.”
“He did not give you something that belonged to his daughter.”
The kitchen blurred through my tears.
