"Is the cake for tomorrow?"
"I was just..." Dorrie Renfro looked down at her hands. "I like to do the layers the day before. So they settle. What's wrong, honey? Is it the car?"
"I met my grandfather today," Cassia said. "At work. He bought three princess dolls and showed me a picture of myself on a motorcycle, and I'd like to see the letter he wrote me in 2016, please. Now. Tonight. Before the cake settles."
She had meant it to come out cold, and it did, and she watched it land.
In the living room the television went silent. Her father appeared in the hallway behind her mother, in his socks, holding the remote, a tall stooped man with a gray mustache who had run the water treatment plant on the east side for thirty-one years and had never in Cassia's memory raised his voice to anyone except the Denver Broncos. Dov Renfro looked at his wife, and then at his daughter on the step, and then back at his wife, and Cassia saw something pass between them that she recognized. She had seen it all her life. It was the look of two people who have been carrying the same heavy thing for a long time and have just felt it slip.
"Dorrie," her father said quietly.
"I know." Her mother wiped her hands on the sweatshirt, leaving two white streaks across SMILE. "I know, Dov. Come in, Cass. Please. Come in. It's cold."
The letter was in the rolltop desk in the den, in the bottom drawer on the left, under the house insurance and the folder marked TAXES 2019, inside a manila envelope from the Pueblo County Department of Human Services, Post-Adoption Services, with Cassia's name typed on a label. Not Daphne. Cassia. It had been opened, carefully, along the top with a letter opener. Her mother held it in both hands for a moment before she gave it to her, and then she sat down on the old green sofa as if her legs had been cut out from under her.
Cassia did not open it. She held it. It was thin. One or two sheets, she thought.
"You read it," she said.
"Yes."
"Both of you."
"Yes," her father said. He had not sat down. He stood by the bookcase with his hands in his pockets, the remote sticking out of one of them. "It came addressed to us. With a letter from the agency on top saying it was for you, at our discretion."
"At your discretion." She turned the envelope over. "I was eleven."
"You were eleven," her mother said, "and you hadn't slept a whole night in four months. You were seeing Dr. Ozment twice a week. You'd broken the mirror. You told your father in the car one night that you wished you'd never been born, and you said it so