For the first few weeks, Tessa was happier than I had seen her in months.
She would come home starving, drop her bag by the kitchen door, and start talking before I could even put dinner in front of her.
“Mom, watch this.”
“Not beside the stove.”
“Just one second.”
She would move the chairs aside and show me some step I couldn’t pronounce, then laugh when I tried to copy her.
She corrected Graham’s posture in the hallway one night and told him he stood “like a folding chair.”
Everything felt normal.
Then, slowly, it didn’t.
About a month after Colin started driving her, Tessa stopped showing me what she had learned.
At first, I assumed she was tired. Her schoolwork was heavier, and she was getting home late.
