“Oh!” her father says, quickly. Isabelle catches his eye, but he looks away. “We have a wonderful vet at home! And Maggie was just there the other week, as a matter of fact.”

“You were telling me,” her grandmother says. “But since she’s still unwell I thought you might like another vet to take a look at her. A real vet.”

Since she’s still unwell. Isabelle sits up straight.

“Dr. Bremer is a real vet,” her father says. He looks at his hands on the table.

Since she’s still unwell, Isabelle thinks, looking around her for the dog; she isn’t in the room. But Maggie isn’t unwell. They had taken care of that, and she is fine now. That’s what the vet had said, isn’t it? She breathes quickly and looks hard at her father, but he does not look up. She looks at her mother; her mother blinks and looks down. Isabelle lets her eyes dart from one parent to the other; their silence is a confession. That scalding sip of tea feels as if it’s spread all throughout her body; her limbs feel hot and numb at once.

Finally her father looks up. “Belle,” he says.

It is all she can do to stand and steer herself from the room, though she has no destination in mind, no plan other than to remove herself from the kitchen, to take herself off display.

They watch her leave.

“Oh dear. She must be very upset about Maggie. I wouldn’t have mentioned it. I didn’t know.”

“It’s all right,” Wilson says. “I suppose she had to find out sometime.”

“You mean you hadn’t told her?” Wilson looks down. “Wilson.”

Ruth sighs loudly. “Oh, this is exactly what we need.”

“I am sorry.”

“No,” Ruth says. “No, no, you did nothing wrong. You didn’t know. Just, yet again, we’ve fucked up.” She takes a breath. She is tired.

Wilson takes a breath. “Now what?”

Ruth shrugs. I give up, she wants to say. “I don’t know.”

I give up, she thinks later. What a wonderful, awful thing to allow herself to think. To imagine giving up was blissful, like falling into sleep, but awful, awful. She bites the insides of her cheeks as she scrubs the soup pot with an old sponge. The water steams, but the burning hardly bothers her. What kind of mother is she to have even thought of giving up? She turns off the faucet and looks at the kitchen clock: six fifteen. Isabelle left the kitchen an hour ago, and when several minutes later Wilson went after her, he could find her nowhere in the house.