Olivia folded her arms and set her back flat against the kitchen wall. Her battle stance: I’d seen it so many times. “Her grandparents, her uncles and aunt, and her cousins.”

Shay. My mother. My father. I’ve never hit a woman. I didn’t realize I was thinking about it till I felt my hand squeezing the edge of the poofy little bar stool, hard.

“Jackie brought her over for tea on the odd evening, after school. She met her family, Frank. It’s not the end of the world.”

“You don’t meet my family, you open hostilities. You bring a flame-thrower and a full set of body armor. How many odd evenings, exactly, has Holly spent meeting my family?”

A little shrug. “I haven’t kept a tally. Twelve, fifteen? Maybe twenty?”

“Over how long?”

That one got a guilty flicker of her lashes. “About a year.”

I said, “You’ve been getting my daughter to lie to me for a year.”

“We told her—”

“A year. Every weekend for a year, I’ve been asking Holly what she did this week, and she’s been giving me a big steaming heap of crap.”

“We told her it would need to be a secret for a little while, because you’d had a fight with your family. That’s all. We were going to—”

“You can call it keeping secrets, you can call it lying, you can call it whatever the fuck you want. It’s what my family does best. It’s a natural-born, God-given talent. My plan was to keep Holly as far from it as possible and hope she would somehow beat the genetic odds and grow up into an honest, healthy, nontwisted human being. Does that sound excessive to you, Olivia? Does that really sound like too much to ask?”

“Frank, you’re going to wake her up again if—”

“Instead of which, you dumped her right smack into the middle of it. And hey presto, surprise surprise, the next thing you know, she’s acting exactly like a fucking Mackey. She’s taken to lying like a duck to water. And you’re egging her on every step of the way. That’s low, Liv. It really is. That’s just about the lowest, dirtiest, shittiest thing I’ve ever heard.”

She had at least the grace to redden. “We were going to tell you, Frank. We thought, once you saw how well it was working out—”

I laughed loud enough that Olivia flinched. “Suffering Jesus Christ, Liv! You call this working out? Correct me if I’m missing something here, but as far as I can see, this whole wretched cluster fuck is very, very far from working out.”

“For heaven’s sake, Frank, it’s not as if we knew that Kevin was going to—”