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He laughs, the good one again, and for one second the worst Sunday of the year has somebody I love laughing in the middle of it. That’s the thing about Danny. That’s what he’s always been — not the absence of the bad, just the standing proof it never got all of me.

He won’t stay over. I try — the couch, we’ll make a bed, anything — and he won’t, because Danny doesn’t take up room in other people’s houses any more than I do. He’s got a motel by the highway and a flight to go make grief with.

At the door he hugs me and I let him. And into the top of my head he says it low, where Beau in the kitchen can’t hear. “You did good, Sloanie. Getting out. Whatever you think you are,” he pulls back and holds me by the shoulders, our father’s jaw sitting on both of us, the family curse worn two different ways, “it’s his mess. It was always only his. It didn’t come with you. Don’t let the news from back there tell you different.”

“I hear you,” I say.

I’m lying, and he can’t tell, because for once I’m not performing okay — I’m performing agreement, which is a different play, and he never had to learn my tells the way Beau’s started to.

Beau walks him out. I watch through the window: the two of them in the wet grey by the truck, talking low, in the register men use when they’re quietly agreeing to share custody of someone. Danny says something. Beau nods, once, the way he nods on the ice when a thing is settled. They shake. Then Danny’s in the cab and the taillights smear off down the street, and the house is just the house again, lit and lived-in, mine for a little longer.

Beau comes back in rubbing the cold off his hands and crosses to me at the window and wraps both arms around me from behind, sets his chin on the top of my head, careful, the way you hold a thing you’ve decided is yours. And I let him. I stand inside it. And for the first time since the night I let myself say it back, the warmth of him doesn’t land like a gift.

It lands like a thing I’m stealing.

It lands like the heating pad and the coconut shampoo, the whole soft rented life, and under all of it now there’s a clock I can suddenly hear that I’d somehow stopped hearing — counting down to the part where I do to him what we do, or he finds out the whole of what I’m from, or the line just comes due, because it always comes due. It came due on Renata’s face in a kitchen in Pennsylvania on a Thursday. And I stand wrapped in the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I start, very quietly, behind a face he can’t see, to draw up the exit I swore to him and to myself I’d never need.

“You okay?” he says into my hair.

“I’m okay,” I say.

It’s the most grammatically perfect sentence I’ve said all day. He can’t see my face. For once, he doesn’t catch it.

Chapter 28

Sloane

tThere are nine people crammed around a table built for six, and every one of them is here because of me, and I keep counting them like the number might come out different if I look twice.

Margo’s at the far end with a glass of the wine she brought because she does not trust other people’s wine, holding court on something to do with torts, gesturing with her fork. June keeps getting up to refill things nobody asked to have refilled, orbiting the table with a dish towel over her shoulder like she was born with it there. Wren’s turned her chair half-sideways and she’s talking to Theo in the low even register of two people who’ve decided the loud end of the table can handle itself. Cash is at the loud end. Cash is the loud end.

And across from me, between Beau and a plate he’s already cleared twice, is my brother.

“So.” Cash levels a fork at Danny like it’s a credential. “Army. You ever —”

“No,” Danny says.

“You don’t even know what I was gonna ask.”

“I’ve met men before,” Danny says, mild, reaching for the bread. “I know how the question ends.”

The table goes up. Beau laughs into his glass, that surprised one he doesn’t plan, and Cash puts a hand to his chest like he’s been shot, and I sit very still in the middle of it and feel the two halves of my life slide toward each other across a folding table in a hockey house, and I do not yet know to be afraid of it. That’s the part I’ll come back to. For a while there, I wasn’t afraid.

“Okay, but seriously.” Cash leans in. “Have you ever jumped out of a —”

“Cash.” Wyatt, from the other side, easy as anything. “Let the man eat.”

“It’s a fair question.”

“It is not,” Wren says, to her plate, and Theo’s mouth does the thing that on Theo passes for a standing ovation.

June’s already pushing the dish at Danny. “You’re too thin. Is the Army not feeding you?”

“They feed us fine —”

“Eat,” June says, and spoons it onto his plate without consent, and Danny looks at me down the table with an expression I have not seen on him in person in three years, which is the helplessness of a man being loved at by a stranger, and I have to look at my own plate, because I know that helplessness from the inside, and I taught myself a long time ago not to do it where people can see.

“So you’re the draft guy,” Danny says to Beau, around a forkful. Not a challenge, just placing him. “First round, Sloane says.”