work clothes. “You can’t tell Jewel this, okay?”
“Tell her what?”
“Promise me.”
“Okay, fine, I promise. What?”
“I’m worried that he’s not really meeting a girl.”
“Who else could he be meeting?”
While my dad tries to figure out what to say, suddenly it hits me. He thinks it’s like the Dateline NBC show where they catch perverts trying to meet up with young kids.
“No, it’s not like that,” I say. “He’s not that dumb to fall for some sweaty pervert pretending to be a girl.”
Without saying anything else, my dad pulls out a printed photograph. I take it in my hand, and it looks like a fashion model. The girl’s hair is windswept, and she’s gazing off to the side. There’s a beach behind her.
“This girl doesn’t look fourteen, and she doesn’t look like an ordinary girl. This looks like the kind of picture you’d download off the Internet if you wanted to impress a teenage boy. If you wanted to lure him somewhere.”
Now I start to feel kinda light-headed.
“Angel, please.”
“I don’t know anything about the girl.”
“What do you know about?”
“Nothing. Honest.”
My dad looks like he might cry. I’ve only seen him cry once before, when Mom and Jewel had that wreck.
“Dad?”
He swallows hard before he answers me. “Yeah.”
“Do you really think it might be a . . . guy?”
“I know it’s a Gmail address, which could be from anywhere. And this picture doesn’t look right. And in the e-mails it sounds like she’s the one trying to convince him to run away. He had to be talked into it.”
“Did you tell the cops this?”
My dad nods and sighs hard. “It’s after hours. They said they’d check the bus station, and Casey is e-mailing a photo. They think he’s just a lovesick runaway.”
“Isn’t that bad enough?”
My dad stands up and kneads his neck with his hand. “They had fifteen runaway reports last week. And running away is not against the law. Honey, I told you the whole story because you’re the oldest. But you can’t tell Jewel. I don’t want her to know anything about what we suspect unless—”
Dad can’t finish what he’s saying, but he doesn’t have to. He bends over for a hug. It’s an awkward angle, but I let him do it, and in fact I hug him back, hard.
Chapter 12
Michael
I come into the kitchen to see my ex-wife at the stove popping popcorn with Jewel, both of them laughing, Jewel on a chair with her arm around her mother’s waist. It’s like a peek into a parallel dimension where we never got divorced and she got the help she needed and straightened herself out.
We could still have been married, which I guess would be good for the kids.
But then I wouldn’t have met Casey.
Mallory turns from the stove to see me, and her laughter falters a little over our common concern.
Mallory is having one of her pretty good days, back like she used to after each child was born. Something about pregnancy and newborns seemed to level her out—maybe the intensive work that a young child requires would crowd out whatever else was going on in there. But eventually they get older, they play alone, they don’t want to be rocked and coddled, they’re in school all day. If we’d stayed married, I would have had to get a vasectomy or I might have ended up parenting a litter.
I walk back upstairs into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. In the sharp glare of the light in here, my scar stands out quite a bit. I remember the young nurse practitioner at the after-hours clinic slipping me a little card with a number for domestic violence victims to call.
I actually laughed. I was dizzy with the dissipated adrenaline from the fight and disbelief that I was actually there at all. Then I apologized. The young man had looked so earnest. He was actually biting his lip, his face creased with concern.
Oh, I’m sure the domestic violence people would have taken me very seriously, probably advised me to leave. But men don’t get to run away and keep their kids.
I suppose I could have made a case for her unpredictable and volatile nature and taken the children with me, but the truth is, she had never hurt the children. Not physically, at least. And she could have plausibly argued that my injury was an accident.
Mallory’s ability to persuade goes far beyond simple charm. I think that’s why Angel has a talent for acting, because she sinks into a