“Just the weekend. Where are you?” she asks, indignant, like we’d had plans and I stood her up. Had it been anyone else, I’d be offended. But this is quintessential Margo, imperious to the core.

I get a mirror attitude in the other ear. Dad has followed me over. “Who is that?”

Rolling my eyes, as if the caller is no one special, I say into the phone, “You’re leaving Sunday?”

“Will you be back?”

“Before then? Noooo.” I drag out the word in honest regret. “I’m so sorry. I’d have loved to have you over.”

“Where are you?” she asks again.

“Who is that?” Dad repeats, this time in a voice that is too loud, too close, and too gruff.

Margo is silent for a beat. Finally, with dawning horror, she says, “I know that voice, and it isn’t one I want to hear. Where are you?”

I hesitate a minute too long.

“Mallory.” Her words come hard and fast. “Are you seriously at the Bluff? What are you doing there?”

“Can’t talk now,” I say, pressing the phone tight to my ear. “Can I call you later?”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Really. Joy loves the beach.”

“That beach? You do know Mom would be turning over in her grave.”

“Actually, no,” I shoot back, furious to be put on the defensive when I am so trying to do the right thing, “I don’t know that, because we never had that particular discussion. It was always you saying it. I have my daughter to think of now. Please don’t pass judgment on me.” I’ve said too much already, but another thought comes and for the life of me I can’t hold it in. “‘Accept what you can’t change by changing what you can’t accept.’”

“What in the hell does that mean?”

“You tell me. You wrote it. This. Week.”

“See? That’s why you shouldn’t be there. You don’t sound like yourself. Go to that place, and you change. He’s a lawyer. He knows how to make his case.”

“It isn’t that.”

“Then what is it?”

His age, his mind, the house, the bluff, Anne, Jack, my memory, the truth—it is so many things that I don’t know where to begin, and that’s even apart from the issue of a gun. So I sigh, lower my eyes to the gravel road, and say a quiet, “It’s complicated.”

“You do know this will ruin my weekend.”

If it does, I think, that’s your doing. But saying it will only make things worse. The spoken word is like bleach. Use it with purple socks—as I mistakenly did once with Joy’s—and though the socks may be wearable, they are never the same.

I keep my mouth shut.

“Okay,” Margo concedes, because I hear voices on her end. “Talk later.”