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“What?”

“Whatever you’ve told that boy,” Pearl said, “he’s still in the county. That’s not nothing. Think about what that man’s ever stayed in a county for.”

Addi Baxter came into the kitchen at three o’clock on Monday in a coat that had cost more than Sunny’s car, with a bag on each arm and Lauren behind her carrying a third, and stopped dead in the middle of the floor, and looked.

She looked at Lara in the chair with her feet up. She looked at Sunny at the counter with the laptop. She looked at the chart on the wall, the pies that had come early, the place by the door where a rifle had been. She looked at Brody, who’d come in the back for water and stopped with the glass in his hand, and at the six feet of kitchen between him and Sunny, and back at Sunny, and back at him.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, no. Who did what?”

“Addi,” Lara said.

“I’ve been in this house forty seconds, Lara, I’m not blind. It’s like walking into a divorce.” She put the bags down. She came across the kitchen and put both arms around her sister in the chair, carefully, around the middle, and kissed her on the top of the head, and said, “Hello, beautiful whale,” into her hair, and Lara said, “Hello, gorgeous cow,” and held on. "I've had three flights and two hours of Lauren driving, God help me, and I walk in and there's a cowboy at the sink who looks like his dog died." She let go of Lara and stood up, and looked at Sunny, and the look changed. "And you're Sunny. I've wanted to meet you since August. My sister rings me every Sunday night and talks about you for twenty minutes before she gets to the baby, and I've seen the sale page, and I've seen the barbecue photos, which are all over half of Boston because Lauren has no shame, and there's one of you and Brody in the middle of a dance floor that I'd frame." She came around the table and hugged her, quick, the way she'd hugged Lara, and stepped back. "So I'm on your side. Whatever it is. I want that on the record before I find out what it is, which I will, by supper."

"You won't."

“You won’t.”

“Honey, I’ve been in this family a year and I found out about the Merritt will before the lawyer did.” She looked past Sunny at the back door, where Brody was still standing with the glass. “And you. Put that glass down and take my bags up before you drop it, you look like a man holding a glass for the first time.”

Brody put the glass down. He picked up the bags. He went up the stairs with them without a word, and Addi watched him go, and then she looked at Sunny again with a different face on, and didn’t say anything, which Sunny would find out in the next four days was the rarest thing Addi Baxter did.

“Right,” Addi said. “Where’s the wine, and who’s coming to supper?”

“Everybody,” Lauren said, from the door. “Jace.”

“Fine,” Addi said, in a voice with nothing in it at all, and went to find the wine.

Jace came to supper. He came in the back with his hat in his hand at six, and Addi looked up from the table and said, “Oh, hello. Jace, isn’t it. One of Dean’s cousins, if I’ve got it right,” in the voice of a woman placing a face from a wedding a year ago, and he said, “That’s right,” and that was all either of them said to the other for two hours. He sat at the far end of the table from her. He didn’t look at her once. She didn’t look at him. Lauren, across from Sunny, put her fork down twice and picked it up again, and Mason put his hand on the back of his wife’s neck under the table and left it there.

Sunny watched all of it from the stove.

She’d been in a lot of rooms. She knew what two people not looking at each other looked like, because she’d been doing it herself since Saturday, and a man and a woman who’ve never had anything to do with each other don’t work that hard at it. She watched a Boston girl and a Wainwright boy not look at each other from opposite ends of a table with a skill that had taken practice, and she looked at Lauren, who was looking at her plate, and Sunny understood that Lauren knew exactly what she was watching, and had known a while.

She didn’t say anything. It wasn’t hers.

Tuesday night at two she went down for water, and he was at the fridge.

Jeans. Nothing else. The light on his side, the door open, a carton in his hand. He turned around when the stair creaked and stood there, and she stood in the doorway in the T-shirt, and it was June. It was the first night in the house the other way around, her on the stairs and him in the light, and neither of them had known then what they knew now.

“I’ll go,” she said.

“Get your water.”

“Brody—”

“Get your water, Sunny. I’m not going to say anything. I’ve said it. I asked twice, and that was the number, and I’m not a man who asks three times.” He shut the fridge. The kitchen went dark except the window. “It’s your kitchen till the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. I’m not going to make you stand in a doorway in it.”

She came in. She got the glass down and filled it at the faucet, with her back to him, and she heard him not move, six feet off, in the dark, and every inch of her back knew where he was, the way it had known on a porch in July, and she drank the water, and it didn’t help.

“Goodnight,” she said.

“Goodnight.”

She went past him to the stairs. He didn’t touch her. He stood with his hip against the counter and the carton in his hand and let her go past a foot from him in the dark. She got to the third stair before she had to stop and hold the rail. She’d told him she didn’t love him. Her body hadn’t been told. She stood on the stair in a T-shirt and shook.

“Sunny.”

“I’m fine.”