Cassia stood in the middle of the den with the envelope in her hands and looked at the two of them, her mother on the sofa with flour on her sweatshirt and her father by the bookshelf with the remote in his pocket, each of them trying to take the blame away from the other, the way they had done her whole life about everything, the dented fender and the time the dog got out, and she felt two things at once that she did not know how to hold together. She felt a fury so large that it frightened her. And she felt that she had never loved them as much as she did right then, watching them fight over who got to be wrong.
"Why," she said, and her voice cracked down the middle, "were you afraid of a letter? You're my parents. You're the ones who sat up with me. You did all of it. What did you think was going to happen? That I'd read one letter and pack a bag and go live in a motorcycle shop?"
Her mother looked up at her, and her eyes were wet, and she said the truest thing Cassia had ever heard her say.
"I was afraid you'd read it and find out that somebody gave you up because he loved you. And I was afraid you'd always wonder what it would have been like if he hadn't. And I was afraid that whatever we were, it would never be as good as what you'd wonder about." She wiped her face with the back of her hand and left flour on her cheek. "That's an ugly thing to be afraid of. I know it is. I've known it for ten years. It doesn't make it go away."
Cassia did not say anything. She could not have said anything. She sat down on the far end of the green sofa, as far from her mother as the sofa allowed, and she put the envelope on her knees.
"There's something else," her father said.
He went down the hall. They heard the closet door in her old bedroom open, and the scrape of a plastic bin coming down off the shelf, and a minute later he came back carrying the blue padded book under one arm. And in his other hand, he was holding a doll.
It was small and cheap and old, the kind you bought at a dollar store in a blister pack, with stiff legs and painted slippers. Its yellow dress had faded almost to cream. Its hair, which had once been golden and combed, had been loved into a kind of yellow felt and was held back with a hair tie that Cassia recognized, with a jolt, as one of her own from the fourth grade, purple with a plastic star. One of its arms was gone at the shoulder. Its crown was a ring of yellow plastic, and someone had colored on it with a pink marker, a long time ago, little careful dots.