“I can do that,” I said.
A year later, the three of us were still living in the same building.
Clare no longer carried every grocery bag herself.
Not because she was incapable, but because she had learned that accepting help did not erase her independence.
Lily still noticed everything.
She still asked difficult questions.
She still wore yellow rain boots on clear days.
But she stopped waiting beside the door whenever Clare and I sat together.
She stopped listening for arguments through the wall.
Sometimes she fell asleep on the couch while we talked in the kitchen, trusting that the voices she heard would remain gentle.
The daisies outgrew their first pot.
Clare moved them to a larger one and placed them beneath the stairwell window.
Their yellow heads turned toward the light I had repaired months earlier.
One rainy Thursday, I found Lily sitting beneath them, reading a library book.
“You’re off duty?” I asked.
She looked up.
“Guards get to rest too.”
“That is a real rule.”
“I know,” she said.
Then she returned to her book while her mother laughed upstairs, unafraid of how much happiness might be heard through the floor.
