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scraggly lilac branch, scurries back inside. He, too, knows something is going on.
    Why does it always come back to the if onlys ? If only Antoinette hadn’t been late; if only the previous client had left any magazine but that one at Ruby’s station. The only if only she isn’t willing to entertain is the one about her actions nine years ago.
    As she steps back into the kitchen, the sharp words slice into her soul. “Is this me?”
    Lark stands in the living area, holding the tabloid page. On the old trunk that serves as a coffee table, Ruby’s purse gapes open. The dog stares at Ruby, accusation brimming in his rheumy eyes. And all she can do is wish that her idiot brain had thought about what was in her purse when she told Lark she could have a piece of gum.

FIFTEEN
    Lark grips the article in both hands, reading it over and over as if she will be tested on the facts someday. From the side table, she grabs a framed photograph—one of the first pictures Ruby snapped of her—holds it next to the newsprint. Her chocolate-syrup eyes shoot up to Ruby’s face, registering the finest details, the pain, the fear, and, yes, the betrayal. Tossing the article and picture frame on the table, she stomps down the hall to Ruby’s bedroom.
    Ruby follows, Clyde padding beside her. Lark digs through the wide bottom drawer of the dresser, pushing Ruby’s sweaters and winter socks aside. Stirring the drawer, Nana would call it, making a pot of sock soup.
    Lark yanks the stuffed toy out from under the woolens, a limp-necked lavender and blush giraffe, one of the few items Ruby saved from Lark’s childhood. Lark jumps to her feet, pushes past Ruby. Back in the living room, Lark picks up the article, studies the photo—an infant sprawled naked on a fur rug, a vivid purple and pink giraffe screaming for attention between pale skin and white fur.
    “Is this me?” Lark’s voice reeks of anger, confusion, and a little-girl wish for her mommy to tell her another lie.
    “Shh. Baby, please.” Ruby steps to the window, peers through the slats. The street is empty, but she can feel it out there, the past, the truth, hurtling toward them, a boulder crashing down her mountain-side, snapping trees, devastating everything in its path. She twists the cord until the blind slats are snug, though such slight strips of aluminum will never stop that landslide. “Come sit down.”
    “No.” Lark folds her arms against her chest. “Is it? Is it me?” She is small for nine, an old-soul sprite with gossamer hair. A truth this big will be a grenade tossed toward the feeble armor of those two skinny arms.
    Ruby feels as if she is teetering at the edge of a flat world, wants to scoop up Lark and run, jump, praying all the way down to land someplace soft, mossy. She takes a deep breath. And tells her daughter about that day almost a decade ago.
    For a moment, Lark just stands there. Then she hurls the giraffe across the room, crumples the page into a ball, throws it into the kiva. She trudges to her room with Clyde at her heels, her bony shoulders sag with the weight of it all.
    Ruby resists the urge to follow them. Pulling the ball of paper from the kiva, she shakes off the soot, a vestige of the last spring fire that never got cleaned up. Was this self-sabotage? she wonders as she smoothes out the creases of cheap, weekly gossip paper. Why else would she have kept the article in her purse, unless deep down she wanted Lark to find it, wanted to force her decision?
    She refolds the article, stuffs it into her pocket. From under a kitchen chair, she rescues the clump of faded, overloved giraffe, takes it back to her bedroom, slips it under the winter sweaters in the bureau. The drawer sticks as it always does. With a jerk on one handle, a lift on the other, the heavy wood slams against the frame, sealing this proof of her secret in a vault of layers and layers of time-yellowed paint.
    Ruby forces herself to walk steadily back down the hall. The fear and