lump?”
Daniel pointed toward his own mouth.
“Inside her cheek.”
I turned toward Lily.
“What?”
She started crying harder.
“Mom, I’m sorry.”
I knelt in front of her.
“Sorry for what?”
“I wasn’t supposed to tell you yet.”
My eyes went back to Daniel.
“You told our eight-year-old daughter to hide a medical problem from me?”
“I can explain.”
“You’d better.”
Three weeks earlier, Lily had bitten the inside of her cheek while eating.
A few days later, she noticed a small raised spot.
She showed Daniel.
And Daniel panicked.
His older sister, Rebecca, had died at twenty-nine after a rare cancer that had first appeared as a lesion inside her mouth.
I’d never met Rebecca.
She’d died years before Daniel and I met.
I knew she’d had cancer.
I didn’t know where it had started.
Daniel had never liked discussing it.
“When Lily showed me,” he said, “it looked
