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I nodded, plastering my face with shame.

“You’re so right; thank you for the reminder.”

Trey cocked an eyebrow in Cal’s direction, but she was too smart. She just smiled and patted his hand, looking so sad for me.

I went against all of my codes for her, I thought as I cracked my knuckles under the table, twisting hard enough that I heard one pop straight out. I broke all of my best rules.

Never again.

It was fake at that moment, her sadness. But when I was done with her, it wouldn’t be.





LILY





“CHECK THE PANTRY,” LILY said, grabbing the flower from the table.

“We already did, Mrs. Harrison,” Ruth chimed in. Her cheeks were redder than usual. In contrast, her hair looked almost golden in the early-evening light.

“Can we go to the store?”

“I don’t know,” Silas said, and Lily could practically see his brain push her and Gavin and everything else to its edges. Silas had always been excellent at compartmentalizing.

“Please, Dad? Sean says it’s okay with him, and Ruth has never had mac and cheese.” Mickey held her friend by the shoulders and widened her eyes like she did when that guy in Venice Beach let her hold his parrot for five dollars.

Silas put his hand on his heart and fell backward as if shot.

“What?” he exclaimed loudly, a whole different kind of loud from moments before.

“Only the kind from the freezer,” Ruth said as both girls burst out laughing.

“Well, we need to remedy that right away. That is unacceptable in the Harrison house.”

His recovery was magnificent. Like everyone else around him, Lily could only watch.

“Dad makes the best mac and cheese; you’re going to die,” Mickey said to Ruth, and Ruth clapped her hands. “And then he adds in kielbasa—O.M.G.” She said it just like that, letters instead of words.

“Let’s get a move on!”

Mickey beamed and wrapped both her arms around his waist.

“Thank you, Daddy.”

It hurt Lily to watch Silas kiss the top of their daughter’s head, so instead, she turned to Ruth.

Lily had suspected Ruth was jealous of Mickey from the beginning. Sure, Ruth was older and more sophisticated, with all of the charms that come from or create said sophistication. But Lily knew that for most girls—the smart ones, at least—charm was a defense, which rose to the surface less like cream and more like dorsal fins. And Ruth was a smart girl.

Standing in that kitchen, Sarah’s poppy crushed in her fist, Lily could see Ruth more clearly than she had that whole summer. And she found herself almost breathless with how familiar she was. Not because she looked like Sarah, which Lily had always assumed was Ruth’s most disarming feature. But because in that moment, as they both stood on the outside watching Silas and Mickey laugh in their own easy world, she looked like Lily.

She still had Sarah’s auburn hair, her sharp eyes. But there was no mistaking that Ruth didn’t have the one thing that Mickey did: Silas. A father who put her above all else simply because she was herself and, therefore, by definition, his. Every time she reached and wasn’t pulled in tight, every time she wanted to be held close but had no one for whom to reach. Every time she didn’t want to but had to anyway. It was the youngest she had ever looked, this otherwise blasé newcomer in their home who wore mystery like a girl trying on her mother’s perfume. The fact that she wore it beautifully was beside the point.

Mickey had wants, sure. But Ruth, like Lily, was a girl left wanting.



* * *



—

SILAS LOOKED UP AND caught Ruth watching him and Mickey. He squeezed Mickey’s shoulders and staggered forward, Mickey attached to him like deadweight, until, in one more exaggerated zombie step, he came to a stop in front of her. Then he reached out his free arm and pulled her in, so swiftly the girls almost knocked their heads together against his chest. Ruth tensed for just a second, but then she fell against him, throwing her arms around his waist, overlapping Mickey’s.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” he asked, and, without looking back once, they lumbered as one out the door.





PEYOTE





JACK’S WAS BUSY, WHICH happened only on the nights I was most desperate to be alone. I had to push past sport-coat-clad elbows and through clouds of smoke just to get within earshot.

“Heya, Pey,” Jack said. “What’ll it be?”

“The usual,” I said. “Whatever you’ve got.”

Jack nodded and disappeared into the basement. I forced my way onto a stool and busied my hands with the bar’s peeling shellac.

“Barkeep! J?ger me!”

I didn’t notice him when he pulled out the stool next to mine, but, as always, when he spoke, he became impossible to ignore.

“Hey, Trey,” I muttered.

“Oh snap!” he said. “Our number one person non-grated.”

“Persona non grata?”

Trey snapped his fingers at the empty space behind the bar.

“Whatever is foreign for ‘the person no one wants.’?”

I opened my mouth to respond but decided against it. This was my night, and I was going to do what I pleased. And in no version of life, in Hell or otherwise, did that include small talk with Trey.