the game. I’d unblock Tig, open up that pathway to another life in case I blew up this one. I pressed my lips together, waited until the wave passed. I was out of it, and I would not step back in and play. Not with Roux. Not with Tig or my marriage. Least of all with Maddy. She’d been played with enough, it sounded like.
“I already told your dad,” I said. Her eyes filled instantly with tears, and she clapped both hands over her mouth. “But listen, he didn’t want the gory details. Dads do not want to know that stuff about their daughters. I only said that you and Luca got a little physical, nothing that could cause a baby, and that you two need to be more chaperoned. Okay?”
Her hands dropped. “That’s really all? You swear?”
“That’s all,” I said, and there went my leverage. I could not go back now. I was well and truly out.
“Can we never talk about this again?” she said.
I laughed. “Sorry, kid, we’re going to be talking about sex and the kinds of choices I hope you’ll make quite a bit before we’re finished.” I wondered if Luca had won his bet, but I didn’t know how to ask her, and it was not really my business. If he had, would she need more or less counseling? “I think your feelings for Luca kinda ran away with you.”
She smiled a miserable smile. “It doesn’t matter. He won’t be here much longer.”
He really had spilled his guts to her. Maybe he had asked her to play the Bet game because he liked Maddy more than he admitted. For most kids his age, a girlfriend in another state, even a gorgeous senior, didn’t have as strong a hold as a cute girl in the room right then.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you’ll miss him.”
“Yeah, but it’s good. For him. He says when they move again, he can get back in school. Do regular stuff. At home in Seattle, he played basketball and—” She stopped, realizing she’d said the city.
He’d obviously told her it was a secret. I hadn’t asked, and yet this girl I loved had laid a new card down for me to play.
I wasn’t going to pick it up. I wasn’t. But I couldn’t help wondering what else he’d told her. His mother’s job? Maybe, but Luca didn’t know I was Roux’s target. At least Maddy couldn’t know that I was being blackmailed. I wanted to ask, to press, to play. I held myself completely still, like Roux, until the urge subsided.
“I’m getting hungry,” I said, as if I hadn’t noticed her slip. “Want to help me set the table?”
“Sure,” she said, relieved to be out of this conversation. She bounced to her feet, and I went with her.
Dinner wouldn’t have seemed like much to an outsider. We sat around the picnic table in the backyard, stuffing ourselves with fresh, hot food from the grill. I spooned sweet potatoes into Oliver between bites of surf and turf and tore up a fluffy roll for him to pincer up and gum. We talked about fall-break plans and the weeds in the back garden, nothing of interest to anyone outside this little circle. But to me every minute was sacred. I wanted to stop time, live inside this meal, this moment, forever.
It had to end eventually. I offered to bathe the dishes if Maddy would bathe her brother, and she laughed at that. Davis, who had shopped and cooked, was absolved of any further chores. He went with Maddy anyway; Oliver loved bath time, and it was fun.
They were all upstairs and I’d just finished loading the dishwasher when the doorbell rang. I felt myself stiffen. I hoped to God it wasn’t Roux, back to try some new angle. Not now. Not tonight. Monday was coming, and I hoped she would take the high road in the end, but the odds were against it. I stomped my way to the front door, tense. If this was my last weekend before the storm caught us all, I wanted to enjoy it, Roux-free.
I swung the door open, but I did not find Roux. It was Charlotte, though I hardly recognized her in the weeping woman hunched over Ruby’s stroller. Her face was so swollen that her eyes were almost shut, like Roux’s in the picture I’d given back. But this was not from bruises. She looked like she’d been crying for hours, and huge tears were