the pain after today’s humiliation, trying to hurt me more by sending a Talkie friend request using that nickname, maybe knowing my father had given it to me.
But some things were never shared, like the private conversations between a father and a daughter, which is why nobody, and I do mean nobody, not even Connor, knew that every night before I went to bed, my dad would kiss me on my forehead and whisper how his love for me went to the moon and back, and there and back to infinity.
CHAPTER 24
Hours after the school assembly, Nina, Simon, Maggie, and Connor gathered in the living room for a family meeting. Family meetings were something Nina had tried out from time to time over the years. They seemed to always convene in moments of great crisis—problems with attitude, chores, bedtime, homework, those breaking points where the parent (typically Nina, occasionally Glen) felt like they were being held hostage by miniature creations of their own making.
When things improved afterward, which they invariably did, Nina would promise herself to have these meetings regularly, but life had a way of derailing the best of intentions. And so the cycle would begin anew—crisis, family meeting, resolution, crisis, family meeting, resolution, and so on, until one day Nina discovered her children had outgrown the small issues and graduated to bigger ones.
With or without today’s incident, what Nina had seen six days into her new job convinced her these meetings were more important than ever, and she renewed her pledge to hold them weekly.
This was Simon’s first family meeting, and he perched himself on the edge of the leather love seat that had come from his home. Nina and Maggie sat side by side on the couch, close in proximity but worlds apart from a solution. Connor was on the floor, playing tug-of-war with Daisy using her favorite rope toy.
“Please tell Maggie what you told me,” Nina said to Simon as she rubbed her tired eyes. Once again she found herself dealing with lingering fatigue from another day spent reviewing case files on the Coopers and setting up home visits, all while planning the rest of her investigation.
She would have been home much sooner to deal with the crisis du jour, but Nina had several new cases on top of the Cooper case, two of them involving young people, each around Connor’s age, who were addicted to pain medication.
Knocking around in the back of Nina’s mind, erratic and cacophonous as a child banging a toy drum, were Simon’s words of warning: how the job would eat away at her free time, to the detriment of her family. The seeds of doubt he’d planted had unfolded into a gnawing worry that she’d miss something important, some critical juncture, and this would send one or both of her kids careening off course, eventually landing them in the case file of a social worker like herself. Nina understood it was irrational, but at the same time her daughter was showing real signs of strain, and Simon was not helping the situation.
“I am so sorry, Maggie,” Simon said with an anguished voice. “I had no idea how that was going to be perceived. Honestly, I was extremely upset with your situation, and felt compelled to speak up, to say something. I wanted the other kids to know there were real consequences for their actions.”
If Maggie was moved in the slightest by his apology, she said nothing. She would not, or could not, make eye contact with him.
“Believe me, if I could take it back I would,” Simon added. “The last thing I want is to make you feel bad or put more distance between us. More than anything I want you to think we can be friends.”
“I don’t even see how it was so embarrassing for you,” Connor chimed in mockingly. “Everyone knows you’ve been kicked out of your friend group, and news flash, they don’t care.”
“They were laughing at me,” Maggie said defensively. “You weren’t there. So shut up.”
“Connor, stop it,” Nina snapped. “You don’t get to weigh in on how your sister feels. And Maggie, don’t tell your brother to shut up.”
“Look, I apologize, profusely,” Simon said. “Did you get any mean text messages or see any posts about it?” He seemed worried that he had made a bad situation even worse.
“No.”
To Nina’s ears Maggie had responded too quickly, almost defensively, like she had seen or heard something upsetting but for whatever reason did not want to share it