“I’m sorry,” I said, “but it’s done and there’s no changing it. What can I say about it? It’s my fault and I’m sorry they’re unhappy.” I spread my hands open and lifted my shoulders, questioning him. “What else can I say?”

“Oh no,” he said bitterly, “of course you’re right, there’s nothing more you could say. Nothing else you could have done, either, I suppose, no way you could have thought more of them than you did of yourself, no way you might have considered them before you took off. Of course there wasn’t anything else you could have done.”

He caught himself, pulled back, stared at me. He was mining hatred, but it couldn’t touch me, had nothing to do with me.

“All right,” he said coldly. “I don’t think you’ll likely feel too badly if I tell you the rest. I thought maybe I should go easy, but now you can hear the whole thing.

“Elliott’s so screwed-up he screams when I leave the house, screams when the housekeeper goes out, screams when Katie isn’t home when he wants her to be. He screams, but he won’t ever talk about it. He’s just closed right up.

“I don’t think he has any friends at all now. Partly he’s embarrassed, doesn’t want to have other kids in because he doesn’t have a mother there, and he can’t even say his is dead, the way a couple of them can; but I think mostly it’s because he doesn’t want to take his eyes off me and Katie and the housekeeper, although he can’t stand the housekeeper. Katie can’t either. She’s about fifty, pleasant enough but strict, and of course she’s really too old to have the energy for kids that age, they need more attention than most, and after all she’s only paid to do it. I don’t know really what I expect from her, it’s not fair to expect so much. In any case, the kids loathe her, but I’m scared of what might happen if I let her go, because they didn’t like the others either but it was a hell of a mess when they left.