Page 71 of Cruel Lies

I open the drawer next to the stove and take out the flour, the baking powder, and the little jug of buttermilk.

Because instead of calling the cops, I'm making pancakes.

Why? Fantastic question.

They didn't touch the kids' rooms.

I checked on my way down, some part of me needing to know before I could do anything else. Hayden's room was untouched. So was Isabella's. Her unicorn mirror is exactly where she left it, with the plastic horn glued to the top and the rainbow decals she picked out herself at Target stuck on crooked.

This was a message forme.

Everything he took, he took because it was mine specifically. He snatched away the glass I've spent a lifetime using to make myself smaller—and everything he left, he left because it wasn't his to touch.

He was in my house. And even in my house, in the dark, unwatched, with the cameras blinded, he stuck to his code.

The note is in the bathroom.

I didn't find it right away because I spilled half the pancake batter with my shaky hands and had to start over. But when the batter is done and ready for when the kids get home, I go back up to walk in and examine the bare wall properly.

Which is when I stumble across it. I don't know how I missed it before, because it's taped to the exact center of the empty rectangle. A single folded card, cream, heavy stock, right at eye level.

You don't need mirrors to tell you what I already see.

Ask me, and I'll tell you every day until you believe it.

I read it once.

I read it again.

And the first thing I feel—the very first thing, before anything soft has a chance to get its coat on—isfury.

Because howdarehe? How dare he come into my home? How dare he touch my walls and blind my cameras and stand outsidemy children's rooms making his little decisions about what stays and what goes? How dare he decide, without asking me, that I don't get to have a mirror, that the tool I use to run my own morning ishisto remove, that my relationship with my own reflection is a thing he gets to redefine while I sleep?

I open my mouth to yell, except there's nobody to yell at, so it comes out as a strangled little noise directed at the empty wall.

And then the fury cracks right down the middle and something else comes pouring through.

Now, I'm laughing.

I'm laughing and it's got tears in it. I have to sit down on the edge of the tub because my knees have quit. This isinsane.It's the single most insane thing anyone has ever done for me or to me, I can't tell which, maybe both, and the line has gotten so blurry that I've stopped being able to see it.

You don't need mirrors to tell you what I already see.

I laugh-cry into the collar of his shirt, which I am still wearing. I sit there on the edge of my own bathtub and I understand that Ronan has, with a great deal of nerve, made it physically impossible for me to do the thing I did in that hotel room in Phoenix: stand in front of a mirror and takeinventory.Belly, hips, thighs. The stretch marks my children left on their way out.

I simply can't do it anymore. There's no glass to do it in.

He didn't tell me to stop cataloguing myself. He didn't lecture me about self-love, didn't suggest therapy, didn't stand there being disappointed in the way I look at myself.

He just removed the equipment, and left me only one alternative.

Ask me, and I'll tell you every day until you believe it.

I sit there for a while, looking at my phone where it rests on the counter and wondering if I'm ballsy enough to text him. That's what he wants, right? Ask him. Make him my mirror.

But I can't bring myself to do it. Not yet, at least.

Besides, I have other things to do.