“Thank you for being a baby. You have a single teaspoon of testosterone right now, and we appreciate it.” I put my hand on Oliver’s chest, grateful, too. Davis looked back up at me. “Do you think he’s pressuring her? I read about those bracelets. The ones that tell boys what a girl will do, and the boys act like they’re entitled to it. Does Maddy have those?”

“Snap bracelets?” I said, and in spite of everything I laughed. “Davis, that was 2003, and anyway, Mads is not that kid. She’s lead clarinet in marching band. She’s in the D&D club. That is not the snap-bracelet demographic.”

“Okay. Standing down. Trying, anyway,” Davis said. His thick, dark eyebrows, so like his daughter’s, came together, worried. “Should I talk to her?”

“God no,” I said instantly.

Maddy would curl up in a little wad and die if he did. Not to mention I would lose my leverage.

His face became very serious, and he looked me in the eyes, putting his hand lightly over mine. Oliver’s breath gently moved our hands together. Up and down. “This isn’t your job. It’s Laura’s. And mine, but this part is really Laura’s, and she’s not doing it. Here you are. Like always. I can’t talk to Madison about what it’s like to be a teenage girl. I have no idea. I’m so damn grateful she has you.”

I couldn’t bear his sweetness, his sincerity. I was the one planning to pressure her into betraying her friend to save myself. I could tell myself that pushing her into selling out Luca wouldn’t matter in the long run. They were just kids. She would recover and forgive me. I could not make myself believe it, though. I’d sold out Tig, and it still echoed in my life. I knew better. I dropped my eyes.

“I better take this little boy to bed.”

“I’ll do it,” Davis told me, but I shook my head.

“He’s had a fussy day. If he stirs, I’ll rock him a little and let him get a bumper nurse.”

I took Oliver to his crib, and I did rock him for a little, sitting in our glider with his weight a heavy comfort on my chest. When he was deeply, deeply out, I put him to bed.

By then the house was quiet all around me. I went down the hall to Maddy’s big room over the garage. I eased her door open, and there she was, sprawled out dead asleep on her stomach. She had kicked one foot outside the blankets, just like Oliver always did. Her phone was by her pillow, though she wasn’t allowed to take it to bed. She’d put it on the charger in her bathroom half an hour before lights-out, but sometime after that she’d crept out and gotten it back, no doubt to sneak-text Luca. Probably Shannon, too, getting real-time advice on what to say to Luca next.

I wished I knew her security code. Reading their text history would be less damaging than what I planned to do. Her soft mouth was slack, her curls a riot on her pillow. She was so innocent, and she loved me. I was going to damage that innocence, that love. I hoped we could recover.

I went back down the hall, and Davis had fallen asleep, too. I couldn’t bring myself to slide back into bed beside him and curl around him as if everything were normal. Tomorrow, after the dive, I was going to peel his daughter open like a little grape.

All at once I realized I was starving. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten. I’d avoided swallowing at dinner, moving food around, then dumping it down the disposal. Now I felt so empty I was howling.

I went downstairs on autopilot, divorced from my body. I felt as if I were perched on my own shoulder, watching my hands open the fridge and unpack the leftovers. I picked up half a meat loaf and bit into it like it was an apple. I swiped two fingers through the potatoes, then shoved the whole huge scoop into my mouth. I swallowed without chewing, without even tasting, and went back for more. I knew from long experience that once I plowed through all this, I would want sweetness. I didn’t keep desserts in the house, but there were frozen waffles, a whole box, and I had some real maple syrup in the fridge. I got the waffles out, still eating meat loaf from my hand, setting the toaster oven to preheat.

I knew what came next. I would eat until I was sick and sluggish with it, then empty myself in ways that would feel glorious and freeing. Once I was done, I would be swamped in immediate shame, so bleak and dreadful that I might go again, two or three times, eating and emptying myself until I was a husk, raw-throated, my eyes bloodshot and watering. I swallowed the meat in my mouth and bit into the loaf again.

I wanted to stop. I couldn’t stop.

I wanted someone to talk to, but I had no one. What I wanted was to not be alone, but my lies left me alone even when Davis was six inches away.

I swallowed another gob of food so huge it stretched my throat. I felt like a snake as the mass moved down. I had the crazy urge to call Roux. She’d been so oddly sympathetic. I want this to work out for you. At least with her, I could be honest. Her mocking and her needling had stopped. She’d recognized herself in me, and she was such a narcissist it made her warm toward me. That warmth wasn’t going to stop her from wrecking me and tearing my family apart, though. Maybe it even made the prospect more appealing to her, like Munchausen’s masochism by proxy.

I couldn’t call her. I was not such a beaten dog that I would belly-creep for petting from the hand that held the whip. I bit and swallowed, tearing at the meat. What did it say about me that Roux was the only person I could be honest with? Only she saw me down to my core, dark and deep, bitter as wormwood. All the things that made me hate myself, she actively admired, and she was the only one who saw me whole.

I brought the rind of the meat loaf to my mouth again and stopped.

It wasn’t true. There was someone else.

Tig didn’t know everything, but he knew my past. And Tig, better than anyone, would understand why I had befriended Charlotte. After all, I’d done it to him, too. I’d stalked him and helped him, all the while staying anonymous. He would believe that my motives at least had been good. I set the last of the meat loaf down on the counter by the Tupperware full of cold potatoes and the waffle box. I turned the toaster off.

I was full, but not sick with it. Not yet. I left all the food where it was and rinsed the sauce and potatoes off my hands in the sink. I grabbed my phone off the charging station and went down into the basement, closing the door behind me. I opened up my contacts.

There Tig waited for me, hidden under the innocuous name of his business. I scrolled down to his entry and opened it as I walked all the way across to the wet bar. I wiped at my mouth, crusted in sauce, and then I touched the number.

It only rang twice.

“Smiffy,” Tig said. He sounded awake, though it was now midnight. Same old night owl.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing. Reading. You okay?”

“No,” I said, and this was a relief to let a simple one-word truth pass through my mouth.

“Aw, Smiff,” he said, and I wondered why I’d ever thought this nickname was distancing and sexless. He said it so sweet.

“I’m losing. I can’t get a toehold. She’s so slippery,” I said. I sank down until I was sitting on the floor, legs crossed, bent over my phone. “I was wondering if you remembered anything else? About Roux. Ange. Whatever. Anything that could help me.”

Tig paused, thinking, but only for a moment. “I’m pretty sure I told you everything.”

“Maybe something small. Like the name of a city, or if she ever called her kid anything but Randy. I’ll wait. Just take a few minutes and think back through it. It’s important. I mean, obviously. Here I am calling you after midnight.”

A longer pause this time. In the end he said, “I got nothin’. Is that why you called?”

The question sounded rhetorical. We both knew it wasn’t the only reason, but pretending dressed the call up in respectability. My life would be so much easier if I would only learn to buy my own BS. I shook my head. I’d called, in part, because I was so damn tired of lying. So I didn’t.

“No.” The truth felt so good I didn’t want to stop. “My stepdaughter has gotten awfully close with Roux’s kid. So close I bet she knows things. Things that would help me fight his mother. I could ask, but she won’t tell me. She’ll lie. You know how kids are. You know how we were. But I know things about her, too. I could make her tell me. But, God, I would have to pretty much tear it out of her guts. She trusts me. I love her. I don’t want to be an awful person.” I was crying.

“You’re not an awful person,” he said, immediate and sure.

“I don’t want to be,” I said. “I don’t want to lose my family.”

We sat there with that for a moment.

“Then why are you calling me?” Tig said, and it was an acknowledgment.

I nodded in the dark, although he couldn’t see me. “I know. I know. I called because I’m lonely and I’m tired and I’m fighting, and right now it feels like you’re the only one who’s on my side.”

Another pause. “I am on your side.”

On the other end of the line, I could hear him moving, maybe sitting down, or if he was in bed shifting the covers. A rustling, intimate sound.

“I shouldn’t call you.”

“You’re not a bad person,” he said.