“No way.” Jen shook her head stubbornly.
“Think about Abe’s school career: the hamster, the fire, the locker-bank destruction? The patio-furniture topple. The Harper French stabbing.”
Paul was saying it like a litany, like there had been an inexorable progression when in fact those had been isolated incidents, all triggered by cruelty and separated by years.
“It’s not him.”
“How can you be sure? I travel and have no idea where he is,” Paul said. “You go to bed totally depleted—and rightly so—from working and being a single parent most weeks.”
If he was so worried that Abe was the vandal, how could Paul fly off every week? How could he sit there eating his lamb shank like it was nothing? Why hadn’t he tried to do anything?
And his tone—light and disinterested, like he found it all slightly amusing, like it was somebody else’s problem and not the thing that kept him awake at night and slapped him in the face every morning and was a steady hum in the back of his head all day?
Jen swilled her champagne but didn’t sip. “No, everything’s different with this school. We have Colin now.”
“That’s what you said about Harper, even whatshername, the bratty one—”
“Isabelle.”
“Right. It’s the same pattern. It’s only a matter of time before it all goes to pieces. You loved Harper, and her mother, and remember, you took them to all of those plays, because Harper loved theater? Sometimes I think I could replace Colin’s name with Harper’s and poof, it would be last year.”
“I never loved Harper, Paul, that’s— No.” Jen’s fork clattered down to the plate. “You’re not paying attention.”
“I pay attention.”
“You try. But you’re not here. If I’m telling you it’s different, you have to believe me, you cannot just sit there and judge, when you don’t have any firsthand information about—”
“Okay.”
“You’re not here half the time.” Her voice had hiked up, come out loud and shrill. “You have no idea what’s happening.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
She stabbed her trout with a fork. Her hand was shaking and her eyes were filled with tears.
“Should I not have hope? Should I give up trying? What are my alternatives here, Paul?”
She’d spoken too loudly. Diners at some of the tables near them had turned their heads.
“I’m sorry,” Paul said. But the apology wasn’t enough. When he extended his hand across the table, she was physically incapable of reaching across and taking it.
She understood how unfair she was being, that the avalanche of fury burying her had little to do with Paul, but she was in too deep to see a way out. She pushed back from the table, grabbed her bag.
“Well”—she flashed him an icy smile—“thanks for ruining dinner.”
And then she stalked outside into the cold.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was Christmas Eve and the Perley house was filled with garlands and tea lights and poinsettias and presents and Mike’s family, who had arrived from California a few days before.
They’d managed to find a spot for everyone to sleep: Mike’s sisters and a brother-in-law were in the unfinished basement, on the Gallegos’s air mattresses, and Hank and Laurel were with their cousins, in a pile of sleeping bags on the floor of the den. Annie and Mike had given his parents the master bedroom and themselves the kids’ room, where they were both trying to change into pajamas in the narrow space between bunk bed and desk without colliding.
“How on earth do Hank and Laurel peacefully coexist in this room?” Mike said.
Annie could hear her father-in-law’s snores through the wall like a buzz saw. She knew their house was too small, but whenever Mike pointed it out, she got an uncomfortable guilty feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I would’ve given anything to be close to my brothers, or have a giant cousin sleepover every Christmas Eve.”
Her childhood Christmases had felt quiet and empty. Holidays like the Perleys’—with traditional recipes and group karaoke and gingerbread houses and skating—were so much more fun for a kid.
According to the therapist Mike had dragged Annie to after Laurel was born, Annie’s lonely childhood explained a lot of her bad decisions later in life. She had been an obvious accident, born twelve years after her next-younger brother, and when Annie was four years old, it was decided she should move to her grandmother’s silent two-bedroom apartment from August through June—ostensibly for the superior school district. But even as a small child, Annie had felt her parents’ relief each August when she’d left.