calmly, Cass, you said it like you were telling him what you wanted for dinner, and he had to pull over on Northern Avenue because he couldn't see to drive." Her voice was steady, but her hands were not; she had folded them in her lap and they were holding each other very hard. "And then this came. From a man we'd met maybe four times. Who had given you to us, who had asked us to take you and never let him back in, and we had promised him we wouldn't, we promised, and now here he was, eight years later, saying never mind."
"That's not what it says," her father said quietly.
"I know that's not what it says, Dov." Dorrie closed her eyes. "I'm telling her what I felt. She asked. She deserves what I felt." She opened them. "I took it to Dr. Ozment. Without your name on it. And she said it might be a good thing, someday, but not now, not in the middle of a crisis, not when you were already so frightened that everyone was going to leave. She said wait until you're stable. So we waited. And you got stable. You got better, Cass, you got so much better, you were fourteen and you were laughing again and you made the volleyball team and you had that friend with the braces, Blythe, and you weren't screaming anymore, and I thought..." She stopped.
"You thought why rock the boat," Cassia said.
"I thought, what if it's like taking a cast off too early. What if it all comes back."
"And when I turned eighteen?"
There was a long silence. Her father looked at the carpet.
"Your father wanted to give it to you on your eighteenth birthday," her mother said. "He had it out. He'd put it in a card. He was going to give it to you after the cake, and I asked him not to. I asked him to wait one more year. And then another one." She looked at her husband, and Cassia saw her mother's face do the thing she had seen it do in the Target parking lot when she was eleven, that slow folding. "He's asked me every October since. Every single October. And every October I said next year. So if you're going to be angry, be angry at me, because it was mine. Your dad wanted to give it to you four years ago. I'm the one who couldn't."
"Dorrie," her father said, "it was both of us. I could have done it anyway. I didn't."
"You didn't because I asked you not to."
"I'm a grown man. I could have done it anyway."