Page 7 of Thin Ice

Go get em.

I sat there a few seconds longer than the schedule allowed, then pulled back onto the road.

Thirty seconds of being Liam's boyfriend. Then down the hill to go be a Harrington.

The gates at Peninsula Point stood open, which meant I was expected.

The driveway was plowed to the asphalt. Wreaths hung on the gateposts — matched, wired, professionally lit. A Christmas you order from a company with a waitlist. Somebody's hands had made them. Nobody's hands in this family.

Then the trees opened, and the house appeared.

Stone and glass at the crown of the point, jutting over the water like it was daring the lake to object. My great-grandfather built the original, and my father rebuilt it into this. A structure designed to be seen from every dock on four miles of shoreline.

We didn't do Christmas here. Christmas was usually in Greenwich at the colonial on Round Hill Road, the club on the twenty-third, the same forty people. The lake was June through August. A summer place, winterized and dark by September every year of my life.

But he'd summoned me here. Opened the house in December, staffed it, plowed it, lit it. My father didn't do anything without a reason, which meant the venue was a message.

I parked. Breathed. Checked my face in the visor mirror out of two decades of habit — composure, verified — and got out into the cold that cut right through my peacoat.

The front door opened before I reached it.

"Alex." My mother.

Catherine Harrington wore winter white and pearl earrings to stand in her own doorway on a Saturday, and she put her arms around me. Here is the thing about my mother: the hug was real. It was always real. Warmth was never the missing ingredient. But no matter what she thought or felt, my father made all decisions.

"Come in before you let the heat out," she said, pulling back to look at me. "How's the semester been? How were finals?"

"Good. I think I pulled a 3.9."

"You think or you know?"

"I know. I just don't like saying it out loud."

She smiled. The real one, not the hostess one. Then it softened into something else.

"I heard about what happened," she said.

"About what?"

"The incident. With Marcus."

I felt my stomach tighten. Of course she knew. Thomas would have told her his version — the version where his son threw punches in a library like an animal, the version stripped of context.

"Yeah," I said. "I shouldn't have done that."

She looked at me. Held there a second. Then, quietly:

"I'm glad you stood up for yourself, Alex."

My chest did something I wasn't ready for. A crack, small and hot, in the place where I kept the things my mother said that might mean more than she was allowed to let on.

"Thanks, Mom."

She held my eyes a beat longer than she needed to. Then she straightened up and was Catherine Harrington again.

"Your room's ready. I had Margaret put fresh towels up." She touched my arm as I turned toward the stairs, brief, almost nothing. "Your father's in a mood. Not a bad mood. A focused mood. You know the difference."

I did know the difference. A bad mood meant short sentences and an early night. A focused mood meant a plan.