“Mom,” she whispered, urgent. “Please not here.”
Trevor crossed the lawn in three strides, plucked the passbook from Lauren’s hands like a curiosity he’d found at a yard sale. He flipped it open, scanned the first page. “A passbook? Seriously?” He looked at me with that easy charm-slick smile that had pulled Lauren toward him like gravity. “Mrs. Collins, this is sweet. But we’re pretty digital these days.”
He glanced at Lauren. “Just spare change, right?”
I started to speak. I started to tell him what that book actually held: years of overtime, second jobs, scraped knuckles, and quiet decisions made in empty offices at two in the morning. But my daughter spoke first.
“Just spare change, Mom,” she said, and her voice carried across the fountain and across the careful distance she had been putting between us for years. “You shouldn’t have.”
She held the passbook over the water.
