I didn’t realize how fast a family can show you exactly who it is until an eight-year-old girl reached down, took my daughter’s brand-new birthday present straight out of her hands, and said — loud and unhesitating, like she was announcing something obvious — “Auntie says I can have whatever I want.”
That was the moment. Not the argument that followed. Not the phone calls I stopped returning.
Not the lake house I eventually sold. That single sentence, spoken by a child who’d been taught it was true, was the thing that finally cracked something open in me that I’d been pressing shut for years. My name is Simon Reeves.
I’m thirty-nine, a police officer in a small upstate New York town for going on twelve years. People see the badge and they draw conclusions — stiff, firm, difficult to move. They imagine I’m built for confrontation, that setting limits comes naturally to someone who spends his days enforcing them.
What they don’t see is the particular tiredness that sets into your bones when you watch people disregard basic decency all week and then come home hoping the people you love most will be different. What they don’t see is how desperately you start protecting the quiet moments, the soft ones, the birthday parties and Sunday mornings where everything is allowed to just be good for a while. My wife Clare says I collect those moments the way some people collect coins.
She’s not wrong. I hold onto them. I guard them against the kind of disruption that creeps in wearing the face of family obligation.
Which is exactly why that Tuesday afternoon hit me so hard. Emma had been awake since before sunrise. I’d heard her moving around upstairs at six in the morning, unable to contain herself, and when she finally came downstairs she was wearing purple leggings, a sparkly sweatshirt, and her hair pulled into two slightly uneven ponytails she’d done herself.
She looked, as she always does when she’s properly happy, like something warm and lit from the inside. “Is everyone coming today?” she asked, holding her breath the way kids do when the answer holds enormous power. “Everyone,” I told her, ruffling her hair.
“And even if they weren’t, we’d still have a great day.”
Clare caught my eye over Emma’s head and gave me the look she reserves for when she can see my anxiety before I can — not unkind, not worried, just: I see you, and I love you anyway. Because yes, I was anxious. Not about the kids from school.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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