forced smile, and says, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”
Like Heather before him, Peter goes still, the blood draining from his face, leaving him a silent, staring statue of a man.
“Can you show me where the bathroom is?” Erin asks abruptly, looking at Dodger.
“But—” She wants to help. It’s written all through her voice, in the desperation of that single, unsteady syllable. She wants to fix this. Roger saved her life, and her father is her father, and she needs them to get along, because she can’t imagine a world without either one of them. They’re essential to the future as she sees it, a future made up of careful equations and perfectly arranged consequences.
“I really have to go,” says Erin, all clenched teeth and tight syllables.
“I would enjoy knowing the bathroom’s location as well,” says Smita.
Dodger sighs. She knows her duty as a hostess, even if she doesn’t want to do it. “I’ll be right back,” she says to Roger and her father, neither of whom are listening. She stands, beckoning for the other girls to follow, and together, the three disappear back into the house.
Roger doesn’t move. He’s looking at Peter, waiting for the explosion he knows is coming. He could try to talk his way out of this—he’s persuasive when he wants to be, always has been—but he doesn’t say a word. Trying to change the way this plays out will do him no good, and may do him a great deal of harm. He knows that. He knows, and still he has to bite his tongue to keep the words prisoned inside, where they can’t get out and make things worse.
Finally, Peter asks, in an almost conversational tone, like he’s remarking on the weather, “Did you think I wouldn’t know your voice? That you could come into my home, my place, and sit here with my daughter, and I wouldn’t remember you?”
“No, sir,” says Roger. “I almost didn’t come, because I knew you would, and I didn’t want to ruin your Thanksgiving. But I was going to have to meet you eventually. There was no way to avoid it. This seemed like the best way to do it without you calling the police the second I opened my mouth.”
“What makes you think I won’t?”
“Dodger would be crushed.” The words are simple, small, and absolutely true. They represent the thing both men want most to avoid, and so they aren’t questioned, even as they change the shape of the conversation. Roger remains seated. Standing might seem like a challenge, even though he’s fairly sure Peter Cheswich is taller than he is. “She brought me home to meet her family because you’re important to her, and she wants us to get along.”
Peter’s eyes are steel. “What you did to her . . .”
“I saved her life, sir. That’s all I did.” Roger shakes his head. “I was in Cambridge when I called. I know you know that, because you’re a smart man, and you would have checked the university call logs as soon as the police got involved. You know the call came from Massachusetts.” From a payphone, no less. (It’s not there anymore. The last time Roger took the T into Boston, he’d passed Harvard Square and seen that the payphones, all of them, had been removed. He’d felt an obscure sense of loss, like something essential and hence eternal was inexplicably gone. Time marches on. Only the dead are left behind.)
Peter has known for years that Dodger’s wounds were self-inflicted; that the boy from Boston was a polite fiction. Still . . . “How did you know, if you weren’t there?”
“Because I was her best friend,” Roger says, and that’s true; that’s always been true. Even when they weren’t in contact, even when he had other people to fill the void her absence left, he has always, always been her best friend. She was happier to live with the hole than she would have been trying to plug it with someone who wasn’t right, and sometimes he wishes he were that single-minded, or that strong. “I knew something was wrong. Whether you want to believe me or not, it’s the truth. I’d never hurt her. If anything, I’d hurt myself trying to keep her safe.”
Peter hesitates. The things he’s wanted to say for five years are difficult to swallow. The evidence of his eyes is harder to deny. “She seems . . . happy.”