chosen a restaurant instead. Adults only. I didn’t make a scene. I took action. Fifteen hours later, someone was hammering on my door.
The message arrived ten minutes before our guests were due. I stood in the kitchen doorway, fighting tears over a beet salad.
Not because of the beets, though they resembled something from a surgical tray, but because Ava was moving excitedly around the kitchen as though her future depended on Grandma approving her lavender glaze.
Perhaps, to Ava, it did.
She’d been awake since 5:00 a.
