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Nothing good is happening here and the rest of us are all looking at one another, not polite enough to pretend we can’t hear it and too curious to talk over her so that we actually don’t. Peekay comes back to us, flopping down next to Park but not leaning into him, and he looks like a puppy that was told he was being adopted but then someone changed their mind. It’s dead quiet and he looks at me because he has no idea what to say or do, and then Branley saves him by being a pushy bitch because that’s what she’s good at.

“What was that about?”

I expect Peekay to tell her to fuck off, but there are three empty beer cans at her feet and the fire’s light only extends so far, making it seem like our faces are the only ones in the world.

So instead Peekay looks up from her phone, dark and silent now in her hands, and says, “You guys know about Sara’s uncle, right?”

And we do, so it’s not like Peekay really has to say anything else. You can’t mow your yard here without someone knowing when you started and how long it took, so if you like kiddie porn we will know. We will know and it won’t be talked about openly, but whispered behind hands, texted from one mom to the next, auto-correct not picking up on the words we don’t use often because they’re too horrible. Kids will be kept a little closer when we’re in the same grocery store and smiles will be stretched tighter or dropped entirely. But we will know. And you’ll know we know.

Except Alex doesn’t, because she’s just now crawling out of that black hole of a house to become a part of us. So when Branley says, “Sara has a little sister, doesn’t she?” and Peekay just starts crying and Park says motherfucker like he means it, Alex doesn’t know what to do. She looks back at me, so very lost, and I don’t want to be the one to fill her in but someone has to. So I grab her hand and we take the walk I’ve been planning, the heat from the fire leaking out of our bodies the second we leave the light, her fingers in mine as cold as naked bones.

It’s been snowing a little, so my tracks from earlier are filled in, and this could be the most romantic thing I’ve ever done except it’s not going to be, because I don’t think I can very well follow up a conversation that has the word molester in it with my first declaration of love.

But the dew has frozen and the moon is so bright it looks like the entire woods is made out of shadows covered in diamonds. So maybe I can salvage this thing after all, and I’m trying to reset my brain when Alex says, “What’s that?”

She breaks away from me, her feet punching through the snow.

“Hold up,” I call, wanting to be there with her, but she’s ahead of me, so when I catch up she’s in the little clearing, a solitary Scotch pine standing sentinel in the middle.

I found it last week after work, when Dad told me Mom said it’s time for a tree to go up. Only we can’t afford the twenty bucks to go buy one at a lot, so I thought if I could sneak one out of the woods without getting arrested for trespassing that would be all right. And I found this one, the right size, no gaping holes. Like it’s auditioning for the role of Christmas tree. So I went to the car and I got my ax, but when I came back I couldn’t do it.

There had been a light snow that day, and the branches held on to millions of tiny flakes. Flakes that would be dislodged by the first swing of my ax, then destroyed under my muddy boots as I tore into the trunk, the steel bite ripping through a life lived longer than my own just to die in the living room and be hauled to the street on December twenty-sixth.

I couldn’t do it. But I also know it’s my last Christmas at home and that’s why Mom is insisting on a tree even though everyone knows there won’t be many presents under it. So I stayed out until two in the morning and drove to the lot and stole a tree, creeping away with my lights off and the weirdest feeling in my heart. Because what I’d just done was technically wrong, but it felt more right than cutting down the pine in the clearing, and the tree strapped to my car was going to die anyway so I might as well take it.

And I lay in bed all that night and thought about trees. Dumbest thing in the world. And I wasn’t sure what was keeping me up until I realized it wasn’t my mom’s face (crying; she’s that way about holidays) I kept seeing in my head but Alex’s, and how she’d told me once she hadn’t had a tree since their dad left. And that’s when the whole thing came together: the woods, the words I love you waiting to be said, and all the things I can’t give her because I’m poor and she’s not.

I could do this thing, though, and I tried so hard to make it right, and Alex is looking at it now. Ornaments so old that not even my mom can justify using them are transformed by the frozen dew and the moon, every inch screaming with a beauty that will dissolve in the sunlight. Dime-store ribbon tied into bows, razor-sharp with ice, will be wilted trash in a few hours when reality steps in. But this isn’t reality and this isn’t the morning. It’s now and it’s my moment and I reclaim Alex’s hand and take a deep breath and she says—

“Tell me about Sara’s uncle.”

41. ALEX

It shouldn’t be this easy.

There are laws in place that stop us from doing things. This is what we tell ourselves. In truth we stop ourselves; the law is a guideline for how to punish someone who is caught.

Claire’s dad likes to say that everything happens for a reason. He must say it a lot because I’ve been at her house only a handful of times and have heard the phrase at least twice. And if he’s right then maybe I’m supposed to hear him.

Maybe Claire was supposed to get that text from Sara tonight when I would see her face. Maybe she was supposed to have too much to drink and cry in the car, sharing memories of the times she’d been with Sara at her uncle’s house. Maybe she was supposed to point it out as I drove past, choking on words so harsh she can’t say them even with beers slicking her throat. Guess I was lucky, she says.

I live in a world where not being molested as a child is considered luck.

A fire has been lit inside of me, and if everything happens for a reason, then the kindling has been laid for years, piled nicely as it waited for a spark. And tonight was steel on flint, a heat pulsing within that keeps me warm even in the cold.

Even as I stand outside his home in the dead of night.

After I dropped Claire off, I tried to do the right thing, tried to be normal. I checked my phone for texts. I walked to the side door. I reached for the doorknob and then I was running, my feet punching through snow and leaving a dark path behind me. Now it’s his door in front of me, not my own. People don’t lock up here. They call it trust but I say it’s arrogance, an assumption that nothing bad will happen.

Not to them.

I let myself in.

He’s asleep on the couch. The lamp on the side table illuminates his half-eaten dinner, now decorated with a fat winter fly bogged down in the mashed potatoes. It’s still struggling a little, threadlike legs pushing against gravy.

He fell asleep with the TV on, the colors flickering across his face as I watch him. The steady rise and fall of his chest, his bare feet on the floor, nails that need to be clipped. The awkward angle of his neck, head resting to the side.

He’ll have a crick in the morning. Maybe.