"And Claire?" Grandma Ruth asked softly.
Diane finally looked up. She looked at Claire, and her eyes were full.
"Claire was always so capable," she said. "Even when she was little. She'd sit in a corner with a book for hours. She never cried. She never needed me. And I think." Her voice broke. "I think I looked at her and I saw myself. And I didn't like what I saw. Because I'd spent my whole life being the one nobody needed to worry about, and I hated it, and somehow I made her into that. I made her into me. And then I punished her for it."
The kitchen was silent.
Claire didn't know what she felt. It wasn't forgiveness, not yet. It was something stranger and heavier than that, like setting down a box she'd been carrying for years and discovering that it had been somebody else's all along.
"You took my quilt," she said quietly. "Mom. You folded the corner under so I wouldn't see my name."
Diane put her face in her hands. "I know."
"Why?"
"Because Ruth made it for you." The words came out muffled. "Because she spent two winters on it. Because nobody ever spent two winters on anything for me, and I couldn't stand that somebody had done it for you and not for Madison. I know how that sounds. I know exactly how that sounds. I'm so sorry, Claire. I don't know how to fix it. I don't know if I can."
Greg pulled out his chair and sat down, finally, next to his wife. He didn't touch her. But he sat close.
"We're going to see someone," he said, to the table at large. "Diane and I talked about it last night. A family counselor. All of us, if you girls are willing, and the two of us on our own, too. Dr. Okafor, at the clinic on Pine. We have an appointment the second week of January."
"I'll go," Madison said immediately.
Everyone looked at Claire.
She thought about the porch steps, and the cone of gold under the streetlight, and the stocking on the broken hook. She thought about all the lists she used to make in the dark, trying to figure out what she had done wrong. She touched the sapphire at her throat.
"I'll go," she said. "But I'm going to Vermont first. With Grandma. For the rest of break."
Her mother lowered her hands. For a second Claire saw the old reflex in her face, the automatic no, the reasons already lining up behind her eyes. Then she watched her mother put them down, one by one.
"Okay," Diane said. "Okay. I think that's a good idea."
They left on the twenty-seventh, in the rented car, with Claire driving and Grandma Ruth in the passenger seat calling out directions she did not need, because the route was one long highway north and the GPS was on.