“Well, the back door was unlocked,” she argues and holds up her free hand in a what-do-you-expect gesture. “I thought for sure it’d be locked and figured you’d have a key hidden somewhere, only I couldn’t find it. Guy knew I was there and started to bark, so I tried the door just in case, and, just like that, it opened.”

“Just like that,” Jack repeats.

I say nothing. He is trying to figure how to handle her. I want to see how it plays out.

“Should I not have?” Joy asks. Her eyes are hidden by the sunglasses, but her voice is innocence personified. “Should I have left him alone and uncomfortable?”

“He didn’t have to pee.”

“He peed the instant I let him out. Has he never had an accident while you’ve been away? Never? Ever?”

Jack scowls.

“So why should he suffer?” Joy goes on. “He knows me. He knows I won’t hurt him. He wanted to be down here with me, and with Teddy and Jeff, and I know how to introduce him to new people.”

“She was careful,” Jeff says. At sixteen, he has the voice and body of a man.

“We took it slow,” says his fourteen-year-old brother, not quite as mannish but almost.

Joy preens under their praise. But she quickly turns back to Jack. “Don’t be angry,” she pleads. “I understand that you don’t want him to attack a stranger, though I honestly don’t think Teddy and Jeff would sue you, since we’re all friends. But, like, I wouldn’t have let Guy attack them. I put the leash on him before I let him out, and it hasn’t come off once, and anyway, I didn’t need to worry at all, because you have done the best job training him. If my cousins ever had a doubt about owning a pit bull, they don’t anymore.” Her head tips toward Jeff. “Am I right?”

“Totally,” says Jeff.

“Teddy?”

“Mom might not agree, but I do.”

Grinning, she faces Jack again.

I’m thinking that my daughter has manipulated him into a corner, when he turns to me in frustration. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

“No,” I reply with a smile. I’m about to say something like, You handled that well, which wouldn’t have been the smartest thing for me to do, when, in a perfectly-timed distraction, my phone rings.

Paul Schuster, says the screen, and something tightens in the pit of my stomach. Where unfinished business is concerned, Paul is right up there. I need to tell my sisters about him. I need to tell Joy.

But not now. Until I come to terms myself with who he is—with who I am—Paul is off-limits to the others.