“Have I signed anything?”
“No, but—”
“Have I agreed to a budget?”
“You told me you had savings for me.”
“I told you I’d help when we knew what we were discussing.”
Victor pulled out a chair.
I put my hand on its back.
“I haven’t invited anybody to sit.”
He let go.
For years, that small movement would have frightened me—not because he would hurt me, but because it meant I was no longer smoothing the visit over. Somebody would leave calling me difficult.
For once, I let that happen.
Bryce pointed toward my phone.
“This is about the picture.”
“This is about what you said before the picture.”
“I was trying to explain the situation.”
“You called me an embarrassment.”
He glanced at Whitney.
“I shouldn’t have used that word.”
“What word would you have preferred?”
“Jo,” Victor said.
I turned to him.
“What did you tell Caroline’s parents about me?”
“It wasn’t a conversation about you.”
“Then answering should be easy.”
Bryce rubbed the side of his face.
“They knew Dad was divorced.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Whitney spoke carefully.
“They understood you weren’t particularly involved.”
I looked back at Bryce.
“Involved in what?”
“Mom, don’t.”
“In your life?”
He stared at the table.
“The Hartleys don’t need every detail of our family history.”
“They needed enough detail to believe Whitney raised you.”
“She was there.”
“So was I.”
“Every other weekend isn’t the same.”
The kitchen clock clicked into the next minute.
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t. I wanted more time with you. You know that.”
“You were always working.”
“I was working when you lived with me, too.”
“That’s what I mean.”
I could hear the fourteen-year-old in that sentence. The boy who hated being collected late because a job had run over. The boy who saw Whitney home in the afternoon and thought that meant she cared more.
I had been willing to talk to that boy.
The man standing in my kitchen was twenty-six.
“Did you tell Caroline who I was at the engagement party?”
His eyes came up.
“Why?”
“Did you?”
“I told her your name.”
“Did you tell her I was your mother?”
He said nothing.
Whitney shifted her purse against her coat.
I remembered Caroline’s polite smile. The easy handshake. The way she had thanked me for coming as though I were somebody her fiancé knew from childhood.
“What did you tell her?”
Bryce’s voice hardened.
“A family friend. We were busy. There wasn’t time to explain everything.”
Victor started speaking, but I couldn’t follow the words.
I pulled out my own chair and sat down.
There was an old nick in the table beside my wrist. Bryce had made it building a model airplane when he was eleven. I had put newspaper underneath, but one corner slipped.
I had been annoyed for about ten seconds.
“Mom,” he said.
I looked up.
“You brought me to your engagement party and introduced me as a family friend.”