not, she was afraid, because she had abused her body last night. She knew for a fact that Sylvia would not stay in Palmetto Grove. Miami, maybe, where there was plenty of need for a criminal lawyer of her caliber, but if they became a family again, then Marsh and Bay would have to uproot and move with her. Maybe that had been her plan all along. Marsh wouldn’t leave Florida, Tracy was certain of that, but he might be persuaded to move to a part of it where Sylvia could be happy, just so Bay would have his mother full-time again.
Or maybe Sylvia was simply leading this little boy on, a child so blinded by hope and love he was incapable of seeing the truth. Maybe she was offering him this possibility so he would try harder and make her life easier, the way parents bribed cranky toddlers with ice-cream cones.
“Well, the first thing you need to do,” Tracy said carefully, “is forget about little mistakes you’ve already made. So forget about the pizza, okay? Just be kind whenever you can. That’s the most important thing you can do. And if you get mad, try to work it out and don’t yell.”
“Will you help?”
“Tell you what, if I see you getting mad, I’ll pull you aside until you have a chance to recover. Okay?”
He nodded gravely and got up. Tracy rose, too, and took him out the sliding glass door, around the girls playing shuffleboard and over to the pool, where Bay’s group was batting a beach ball back and forth in the shallow end.
“You won’t tell my dad, will you?” he said. “You know, about the stuff I told you?”
She caught the eye of his counselor and nodded, then dredged up a smile and patted Bay on the shoulder. “I won’t.” She didn’t add that Marsh no longer wanted to hear anything she said anyway.
On her way back she was circling the shuffleboard court when Olivia—who she hadn’t realized was one of the players—stopped her.
“Can I talk to you, Tracy?” Olivia asked.
Tracy’s eyes flicked to the colorful mural over the rec room door. She expected to see a new hand lettered addition: “The doctor is in,” but apparently that message was only in the eye of the beholder.
“Tell your counselor you’ll be with me,” Tracy said, nodding. “I’ll meet you in the rec room.”
She settled herself on the sofa again, and Olivia, hair plastered to her neck and legs growing longer by the moment, came over and flopped down beside her.
“Rough weekend?” Tracy guessed. She had known it wouldn’t be easy for Olivia to see her father in prison. In the last months Olivia had stopped talking about the things that had happened to her family last year, though she probably still talked to her grandmother. All in all she seemed to be recovering, but it was clearly difficult.
“It’s a long way there and back,” Olivia said.
Tracy nodded, feeling like a bobblehead doll.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Olivia added.
“No problem.”
“I want to talk about Lizzie.”
That surprised Tracy. “Did you two have a fight?” At Olivia’s age, girlfriend fights were the worst. Tracy remembered a few and inwardly cringed.
“No.” Olivia scrunched up her face. “It’s just that she’s tired of moving around. She says she and her mom have moved dozens of times, and she’s sick of changing schools and losing friends.”
Tracy considered. She wasn’t sure why Olivia was telling her this, because obviously Tracy couldn’t make Dana stay at Happiness Key. She wondered if Olivia wanted to fix her friend’s life as a way of making up for the problems in her own. Maybe seeing her father had set Olivia thinking.
“Being a single parent is hard,” Tracy said, feeling her way. “I imagine Dana has to go wherever she can find a job.”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“Really?” Tracy said in a noncommittal tone. She was getting pretty good at the counseling stuff, and she wasn’t even sure how it had happened.
Olivia lowered her voice. “That’s why I came. To tell you what Lizzie said. She said her mom is afraid.”
“She told you that?”
“They’ve been moving forever. That’s what Lizzie said. And her mom won’t answer questions. When Lizzie asks about her dad, her mom says she’s too young to understand everything. But then she acts even more afraid. So Lizzie stopped asking, but she still really wants to know.”
“I see.” Tracy didn’t understand why Olivia was telling her this.