Chương 1
"""Blake’s hand landed between June’s shoulder blades just as she leaned toward the ten candles, and my daughter’s face disappeared into the castle cake I had spent three nights building.
For one stupid half second, nobody moved.
The dining room stayed full of the small noises that had existed before it happened: a spoon striking a glass, the refrigerator motor humming from the kitchen, somebody’s phone vibrating against the buffet.
Then June screamed.
I reached her before the cake stopped sliding across the table.
One of the sugar windows had shattered against her cheek, and a bright line of blood appeared beneath her left eye through the lavender frosting.
“Dad.”
She said it quietly, which scared me more than the scream had.
“I’ve got you.”
Her hands were shaking when I lifted her away from the table.
Buttercream covered her eyelashes, her hair, the front of the yellow dress she had chosen because Rebecca once told her yellow made her look like summer.
“Don’t rub your eye, Junebug.”
“It stings.”
“I know.”
Behind us, Blake started laughing.
It was not a nervous laugh.
It was the full, open-mouthed laugh he used whenever he believed a room had already decided to forgive him.
“Oh, come on,” he said.
“She’s fine.”
I turned with June against my chest.
Blake had frosting on one cuff of his charcoal coat.
He looked at it, frowned, and wiped it with a napkin.
I handed June to my cousin Mara, who had already grabbed a clean dish towel and was saying, “Let me see, sweetheart, just let me look.”
Then I crossed the two steps between my brother and me.
I shoved him.
Not hard enough to hurt him.
Hard enough to make him understand that I was no longer laughing.
His hip struck the edge of a chair, and the chair scraped across my parents’ hardwood floor.
Every conversation stopped.
Blake stared at me.
“You just put your hands on me.”
“You pushed a ten-year-old into a cake.”
“It was a joke.”
“She’s bleeding.”
“She got a scratch.”
I moved toward him again, and Mara said my name sharply.
“Ethan.”
That was enough.
I stopped.
June was watching me.
She had frosting smeared across one cheek and a towel pressed under her eye.
Her lower lip trembled even though she was trying to hold it still.
I went back to her.
My mother reached Blake first.
“Your jacket,” she said.
She began brushing crumbs from his sleeve.
Blake looked over her head at me as if that settled something.
The jacket mattered.
The kid did not.
My father remained at the head of the table, one hand resting beside his untouched glass of bourbon.
At sixty-eight, Walter Mercer still had the posture of a man expecting people to straighten when he entered a room.
Most of them did.
He had built Mercer Mechanical from two service vans into a regional commercial contractor with warehouses in three states, and for as long as I could remember, that achievement had been used to settle arguments that had nothing to do with business.
Walter had succeeded.
Therefore Walter was right.
Blake was Walter’s chosen successor.
Therefore Blake was usually right too.
I was the exception everybody had learned to live with.
“Dad,” June whispered.
“I want to go home.”
“We’re going.”
My mother glanced at me.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
I looked at her.
She seemed genuinely confused by my expression.
“Mom, her face is cut.”
“And Mara has it handled.”
Mara’s mouth tightened, but she kept cleaning June’s cheek.
My mother lowered her voice as though I were the one embarrassing the family.
“Your father arranged this whole dinner.”
“I arranged June’s birthday.”
“At our house.”
“Because you insisted.”
“Well, yes, because we have room for everyone.”
June tugged at my shirt.
I looked down.
“Can we please go?”
“Yeah.”
I took the towel from Mara and checked the cut.
It was shallow, maybe half an inch long, but it sat close enough to June’s eye that my stomach stayed tight.
“I think we should get that looked at.”
Mara nodded.
“I would.”
Blake snorted.
“For that?”
I ignored him.
That bothered him more than if I had answered.
“Ethan.”
My father had finally spoken.
The room changed around his voice.
My mother stopped fussing with Blake’s sleeve.
My aunt put down her wineglass.
Even the kids in the den seemed quieter, though that was probably my imagination.
Walter tapped his signet ring once against the tabletop.
The sound had followed me through childhood dinners, employee Christmas parties, college discussions, Rebecca’s funeral arrangements, and every other moment when my father wanted silence without asking for it.
“You owe your brother an apology.”
I thought I had misheard him.
“For what?”
“You assaulted him in my home.”
Blake smiled without quite smiling.
I looked at June.
She had heard.
That mattered more than anything else in the room.
“He shoved her face into the cake.”
“He was playing.”
“He cut her.”
“It was an accident.”
“An accident is knocking over a glass.”
My father’s jaw shifted.
“Watch yourself.”
“No.”
My mother whispered, “Ethan.”
I could smell vanilla and warm sugar from the ruined cake.
I had been smelling those things for three nights.
After June went to bed, I had worked at the small kitchen table in our apartment with online tutorials propped against a coffee mug and Rebecca’s old sketch beside the mixing bowls.
I had failed twice at the towers.
The first batch leaned.
The second cracked.
On Thursday at two in the morning, I had sat on the floor with my back against the dishwasher and considered buying a grocery-store sheet cake instead.
Then I had looked at Rebecca’s sketch.
It had been drawn seven years earlier on a paper placemat at a diner where June, then three, had been refusing to eat pancakes because they were “too flat.”
Rebecca drew a castle around them.
June ate every bite.
May you like
I still had the placemat.
What I did not have anymore was the silver Hamilton watch Rebecca gave me on our fifth anniversary.
