“It is possible I’ve been saving it up for a while.”

“Huh,” she said in a tone that was hard to read.

Oh, this was going brilliantly.

Christie, my wife of less than two months, had told me not to try so hard to connect with Tessa—to just be myself—but I was still trying to figure out what that self looked like in the role of a stepfather. I’d never been a dad before, and I certainly didn’t know the right things to say to a teenage girl.

Tessa was quiet, and I wasn’t sure if I should try to find something to talk about or not. In the end, I said nothing.

Empathy has never been my strong suit, but I’d been doing my best to remain understanding with her. It’d been a tumultuous couple of weeks for this girl.

She’d had a foster sister for a few months, but now that was over, and her mood swings had been more pronounced than usual as she processed being an only child again.

Azaliya Saleem was a fourteen-year-old girl who’d been staying with us through a special arrangement with social services. As it turned out, she was with us nine weeks, and then a relative of hers from her extended family in Kazakhstan agreed to care for her.

Azaliya’s departure from our lives had happened abruptly and took Tessa by surprise. Honestly, it was affecting her more than I thought it would. I hadn’t realized how much having a sister, even if it was only a foster sister, had meant to her.

“Can I ask you something, Patrick?” she said, drawing me out of my thoughts.

“Sure.”

“Do you know why Mom’s pissed at me?”

“What makes you think your mom is mad at you?”

A shrug.

Tessa and Christie were extremely close, and the girl could read my wife even better than I could. But then again, I’d only met Christie in the spring and, after a bit of a whirlwind romance, proposed—and, since we couldn’t come up with any good reason to put off the wedding, had promptly tied the knot.

Neither of them spoke much about Tessa’s biological father, but from what I’d gathered, he hadn’t even stuck around long enough to be present for her birth.

“She just needed some time to herself this weekend,” I explained.

“You mean time away from me.”

From us, I thought.

“From everyone,” I said.

“Yeah, but at a monastery?”

“They have a retreat center there. It’s really not as weird as it sounds.”

“Uh-huh. Well, it sounds pretty weird. I think she’s upset about something, and I want to know what it is.”