first thing that came to mind.
Chanel said it instead. “Family award. That’s something.”
Sylvie picked up her purse. “I could use some air.”
She made it to the side door of the hall before she had to stop and just stand for a moment, her hand on the brick wall, breathing carefully.
Walter. Getting a family award.
She let the irony of that sit where it was. She had spent fifty years becoming the architecture of that family. She had raised three children, managed the household, hosted every Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter and birthday, and cared for his mother at the end when he said hospitals made him too anxious. She had stretched his paycheck through the lean years. She had kept his pills on the counter so he wouldn’t forget them on his way out the door.
Family award.
She breathed in.
Then she drove
