Chương 2
The same basketball hoop he had installed over Lauren’s objections because the homeowners association required approval.
It had not changed.
Only his understanding of it had.
“You’re lying,” he told Lauren.
She put her sunglasses back into place.
“No.”
“My parents bought this place.”
Robert looked at Margaret.
That look frightened Lauren more than Ethan’s shouting had.
Robert had always known about the deed. He had been at the closing.
But there were pieces of the lie even he had never understood.
Margaret began to cry without sound.
Not dramatically. Her mouth simply tightened, and tears appeared.
Ethan stepped toward her.
“What did you do?”
Margaret whispered, “Not here.”
“You let me throw my wife out of a house she owns, and now you want to talk about where?”
“Ethan.”
“Did you know?”
Robert answered this time.
“Yes.”
The word landed with less noise than the suitcase had.
Ethan took two backward steps.
Lauren felt Mia tug her hand.
“Can we go?”
That ended it for Lauren.
“Yes.”
She turned toward the sidewalk.
“Lauren!” Ethan called.
She kept moving.
“Lauren, wait.”
Mia looked back.
Lauren gently squeezed her hand.
“Eyes forward, sweetheart.”
Officer Mercer called after Lauren, “Ms. Hayes, do you want the documents back?”
She stopped.
“Yes, please.”
He resealed them as best he could and brought them over.
Quietly, so Ethan could not hear, he said, “Do you have somewhere safe to stay?”
“Yes.”
“Does he?”
Lauren almost laughed.
The sound got caught somewhere below her ribs.
“He has a house.”
Officer Mercer glanced back at Ethan standing in the driveway beneath a property he had just learned belonged to someone else.
“I mean somewhere he can stay if you eventually need possession returned.”
“My attorney will handle it.”
“That’s the better way.”
Lauren nodded.
Then she walked.
The turquoise suitcase bumped behind her, one wheel making a faint rhythmic scrape.
She did not look back again.
For the first block, neither did Mia.
At the corner, however, her daughter twisted around.
“Daddy’s still there.”
Lauren’s throat tightened.
“I know.”
“Grandma’s on the ground.”
“Grandpa will help her.”
“Is Daddy mad because the house is yours?”
Lauren stopped beside a mailbox shaped like a small red barn.
There were questions adults could answer honestly and questions that were technically simple but emotionally too large for a six-year-old.
She crouched.
Mia’s brown hair had caught across her lips. Lauren brushed it away.
“Daddy is upset because he learned something he didn’t know.”
“Why didn’t he know it?”
There it was.
The question Lauren had been avoiding for seven years.
“Because some grown-ups made a bad decision a long time ago.”
“Did you?”
Lauren nearly said no.
The answer came naturally, defensively, instantly.
She swallowed it.
“Yes,” she said.
Mia’s eyebrows pulled together.
“You made the bad decision?”
“I was part of it.”
“Why?”
Lauren glanced down the street.
Officer Mercer’s SUV remained parked outside the house. Ethan was now talking with Robert. Margaret had gotten to her feet.
“It’s complicated.”
Mia frowned.
Lauren had always hated when adults told children that.
“It means I need more than one sentence to explain it,” she corrected. “And I want to explain it right.”
Mia considered this.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Can I have pancakes?”
Lauren laughed.
It surprised her enough that she covered her mouth.
Mia smiled because she had made her mother laugh, though she clearly did not know why pancakes had been funny.
“Yes,” Lauren said. “You can have pancakes.”
They walked toward the dark blue sedan parked around the corner where Lauren had left it to keep the driveway clear.
Her phone began vibrating before she reached the car.
ETHAN.
She let it stop.
It rang again.
Then Margaret.
Then Ethan.
Then Robert.
By the time Lauren buckled Mia into the back seat, twelve messages waited on the screen.
She did not read any of them.
She put the turquoise suitcase in the trunk, sat behind the wheel, and stared at her hands.
They were shaking.
That annoyed her.
For years she had imagined courage as the absence of this exact thing.
No trembling.
No nausea.
No need to count breaths.
She had been wrong.
Courage, apparently, could look like sitting in a hot car with sweat collecting under a floral dress while your hands shook over the steering wheel and your daughter asked whether the pancake place still had the smiley-face ones.
“Yes,” Lauren said.
“You didn’t look.”
“They have them.”
“How do you know?”
“They’ve had them since before you were born.”
Mia leaned back.
“That’s super old.”
“Cruel.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Lauren started the car.
Only when the house disappeared behind them did she allow herself to cry.
She did it silently.
Mia was looking out the window.
Lauren wiped beneath her sunglasses with the heel of her palm before her daughter turned around.
The first lie about the house had been told in a hospital cafeteria.
Seven years earlier, Lauren had been twenty-six, newly pregnant, newly engaged, and surviving on saltine crackers because most food smelled like gasoline to her.
Robert and Margaret had asked to meet her without Ethan.
They sat beneath fluorescent lights while a vending machine hummed behind them. Robert still wore the paper visitor badge from the cardiology floor where his older brother had been admitted.
Margaret had pushed a paper cup of water toward Lauren and said, “We have a problem.”
Lauren had assumed she meant Ethan.
That should have warned her.
Instead Margaret explained that she and Robert were losing their home.
Not the house Lauren later bought. Their previous house, forty minutes away, where Ethan had grown up.
Robert’s construction business had failed after a developer defaulted on a large contract. They had refinanced twice. Margaret had hidden the second refinance from Ethan because he was dealing with his own financial trouble after an ill-advised fitness studio partnership.
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Nobody in that family seemed able to tell Ethan bad news when he was already carrying other bad news.
It was presented as kindness.
