Three days after the birthday the house goes back to ordinary.

  Laundry. Sunlight. Elise on the living room floor with her doll, building a whole world out loud, giving everyone different voices and changing them mid-sentence when they don’t sound right. She’s been talking for twenty minutes straight.

  I fold. I listen. My hands are steady.

  She mentions Annie. How Annie smells like a fancy shop. How she let Elise do her hair and just sat there.

  “She didn’t even look in the mirror,” Elise says. “She just let me.”

  “That sounds fun,” I say.

  “It was.” She picks up the doll again. “Mama, do you think Annie likes me?”

  “I think Annie loves you.”

  Elise smiles at that and goes back to her game.

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  I pick up one of Sebastian’s shirts. Start folding it.

  “I wish she was my mom instead.”

  Elise says it the way she says everything. Like it’s just a fact she found.

  Then she goes back to her game.

  My hands stop.

  I’m holding Sebastian’s shirt. Half folded. I look at Elise, at the side of her face, at her cheekbones that came from me, at the hands that are my hands made small.

  She doesn’t know. She’s five. She doesn’t understand what she just said.

  I know that.

  I know it and it still goes through me like something cold.

  Because I heard the birthday wish too. Three days ago, over candles, with everyone watching, I heard my daughter wish for someone else to be her mother. And I told myself she didn’t mean it. I’ve been telling myself that for three days.

  And now she’s said it again. Out loud. To my face. Without knowing it was my face.

  Something that has been holding, quietly, for a long time, gives way.

  I finish folding the shirt. I put it on the pile. I stand.

  “I’m starting dinner,” I say.

  Elise doesn’t look up.

  I go to the kitchen. I measure things I’ve made from memory a hundred times. I need something to count.

  That night I tuck Elise in. She reaches for my hand and I take it. I kiss her forehead. I turn off the lamp.

  In the hallway I slide down the wall and sit on the floor with my knees up and my back against the baseboard.

  I don’t cry.

  I sit in the quiet of the house I run and I think, for the first time without pushing it away:

  Something has to change.