Thomas looked at the drawing in his hands, at his daughter's careful rainbow letters, at the third stick figure she had included despite everything — despite six years of coldness this small girl had somehow decided to forgive in advance, simply because Diane was part of the family Lily had chosen to draw. Something in Thomas broke open that he had spent six years keeping carefully, quietly sealed shut. He pulled Lily into his arms, feeling her small body still shaking with leftover sobs, and held her the way he perhaps should have been holding both of them, every single day, for years. "Thomas, it's really not that big a deal," Diane started, arms still crossed, though something in her voice had begun to waver under the weight of her husband's silence. "Our daughter drew this for us," Thomas said, and his voice, when it finally came, was louder than it had been in this house in longer than he could remember — not quite a shout, but close enough to one that Diane took an involuntary step back. Tears he made no attempt to hide ran freely down his face as he held the drawing up between them. "She spent six days making this. She wrapped it herself. She stood there and watched you throw six days of her love for this family into the trash without even opening it, and you are standing here telling me it isn't a big deal?" Diane opened her mouth, and for the first time in eight years of marriage, found she had absolutely nothing to say back. Lily, still curled against her father's chest, looked up at both of her parents with the crumpled, rescued drawing held tightly in her small hands — and somewhere in that quiet, cracked-open dining room, Thomas understood that tonight was not going to be the kind of night either of them could simply move past in the morning.