Page 85 of Thin Ice

She was crying. Her shoulders shaking, her hands pressed together in her lap, tears running down her face onto the blue cardigan. She looked at me, and I saw every year of her marriage in her face. The accommodations. The concessions. The slow trade of herself for this house and this life and this man.

"I'm sorry," she said.

I waited, but nothing else came. That was it.

Not I love you. Not I'll talk to him. Not come home.

I'm sorry.

I stood there. The dining room. The table where I'd eaten hundreds of meals. The windows looking out over the frozen lake.

I didn't answer her.

That was it.

I turned and walked out of the dining room. Down the hall. Past the photos. Into the den.

"Alexander, where are you —?"

The den was dark. Wood-paneled walls, leather chairs, the shelves lined with things my father kept because they proved something. First editions. Awards. Framed letters. And on the third shelf, between a crystal decanter and a photo of my father shaking hands with the governor, a trophy.

I stopped.

There it was the IRA Championship, 1967. Riverside State University.

I picked it up. I didn't think about it. I didn't calculate or weigh the options or run the scenario forward. I picked it up because it was Riverside's, not my father's. Because it belonged to Riverside, not to this house. And because I didn't want a single thing connected to Liam or his school sitting on a shelf in a room where my father poured scotch and congratulated himself.

A Christmas gift. Late, but right.

I held it and walked back down the hall.

My parents were both standing when I came back into the dining room. My mother's face was wet and broken. My father, with his napkin still in his hand, his composure cracking because he hadn't planned for this. He hadn't planned for the version of me that walked into rooms and took things.

I held up the trophy. "And this is not yours," I said.

I walked out the front door. It closed behind me. The cold hit my face, and the gravel crunched under my feet, and I got in the car and put the trophy on the passenger seat and sat there with my hands on the wheel.

The kitchen light was still on. No one came to the door.

I looked at the trophy. My hands were shaking. My chest was tight, and my eyes were burning, and I felt relieved and hurt and scared and something else I couldn't name, something close to awe. Because I hadn't planned that. Any of it. Not the speech, not the trophy, not walking into the den without knowing what I was going to do until I was already doing it.

That was the most impulsive thing I'd ever done in my life. I spent twenty years calculating every move in that house, and I'd just walked in and taken something off a shelf because it didn't belong to them, and neither did I.

I started the engine. Backed down the driveway. Hit the lake road south.

My phone buzzed on the seat next to the trophy.

Liam

Where are you?

Chapter 23: Liam

He had been gone too long.

I noticed at eight-fifteen. Coffee run, he'd said. Twenty minutes. The place on Route 4 was a ten-minute drive. I lay on the couch with a blanket over my legs and Noah's feet two cushions away, and told myself it was a line, it was a slow morning, it was nothing.

Eight-twenty. Remy was in his chair by the window. Ethan was still asleep. Priya was reading something on her phone at the kitchen table with her glasses on. Outside, the snow from last night covered the yard and the fire pit and the Adirondack chairs and the frozen lake beyond. The sky was the color of nothing.