“Richard is the one who made it so Andrew can’t inherit without getting married,” Meemaw continues. “He practically forced the poor boy into this situation.”

Alan turns to his mother. “So it’s true? What it said in her silly little cartoon? And you knew, Mother? About this stipulation?”

Meemaw takes a sip of her morning sangria.

“Is it all true, then? The stuff about… about the Sam and Ricky characters…?” Alan slices his gaze between Andrew and Dylan, and there’s an undercurrent to this question that makes me hold tighter to Andrew.

“Yes,” Andrew says, in a shadow of a whisper. “It’s all true.”

Alan erupts. “You’ve been sleeping with Dylan? Under this roof?”

“What is it that upsets you, exactly, Mr. Prescott?” Dylan snaps up from the arm of the couch. “The fact that your almost-thirty-year-old son has sex, or the fact that he has sex with me?”

Alan advances on Dylan. “How dare you speak to me like that in my own house? After everything this family has done for you?”

“Your house?” Andrew screams back. “You’re never here! You never, ever show up for this family, and we all know the real reason—”

“Can we not shout, please?” Katherine interrupts harshly. She presses two fingers to her left temple. “This whole thing is giving me a migraine.”

Alan continues to shout. “The real reason is that I’m busy providing for this family like a man is supposed to, which you would know if you ever—”

Andrew barks a laugh. “Spare me your gender essentialism. You’re never around because you cheat on Mom.”

“Andrew,” three people say at once, their voices blending together in the anxiety vortex that is my brain. I can’t think about Andrew and Alan, can’t think about what this news means for Katherine. All I can think about is Jack, still sitting on the couch, holding onto the laptop like it’s another shiny shield that might protect her.

“What? We all know,” Andrew spits. “He has an apartment on the waterfront for his twenty-three-year-old girlfriend, so tell me, Dad: how, exactly, is that providing for this family?”

“I’m not going to stand here and be insulted like this,” Alan declares, and then he promptly storms out of the room. Katherine whimpers, only once, before she straightens like the terrifying force of a woman she is.

“Look, none of this is Dylan’s fault. Or Ellie’s!” Andrew says, quietly enough to appease his mother’s apparent migraine. “Ellie works at one of my investment properties. I asked her to do this. I practically begged, and I knew she would go along with it because she desperately needed the money. All of this was so I could claim the inheritance, so if you need to be mad, be mad at me.”

“Andrew,” Lovey says in a low, shocked voice, clutching at her throat. “Why? Why would you put our family through this?”