The Love We Missed novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Halloween

"Twenty-five?" I said.

Inside, Tricia's door flew open.

"I'm going to bed for real now," she announced to the hallway. "Nobody's listening to anything."

The door banged shut again.

Ciaran laughed against my neck, and I felt it all the way down.

"Ask me later," he said.

He kissed me one more time, slow, and then he lifted me off his lap and set me on the swing.

He went down the steps to his truck without looking back.

I think if he'd looked back, he wouldn't have gone.

A week later, on Halloween, my daughter was a cupcake.

Tricia had sewn the costume out of a laundry hamper, pink felt and an entire bag of pom-poms for sprinkles.

Nellie couldn't sit down in it.

She didn't want to sit down in it.

"I'm a cupcake," she told every door on Butler Street. "Trick or treat. I'm a cupcake."

Ciaran walked beside her in his chef's whites with a wooden spoon tucked in his belt.

"What are you?" a little Spider-Man asked him.

"I'm the baker," Ciaran said. "I'm in charge of her."

"You're not in charge of me," Nellie said. "Mama's in charge of me."

"She's right," Tricia said. She was dressed as a nurse, which was just her scrubs with a plastic stethoscope on top. "Nobody's in charge of the women in this family."

By eight o'clock Nellie's bucket was heavy and her felt was crushed on one side from bumping into a lamppost.

She fell asleep on Ciaran's shoulder on the walk home, a pom-pom stuck to his cheek.

"She's sleeping in with me tonight," Tricia said at the bottom of the steps.

"Trish, you don't have to."

"I want to. We're going to eat her candy while she's unconscious." She took Nellie off his shoulder, very gently, and gave me a look over her curls. "Go somewhere. Both of you."

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