The car, at last, materialized. Wallis sank into the back seat and immediately lay down.

Bo directed me home; other than that, we didn’t speak. The gate to the Reed driveway was open when we arrived. In the house, lights, music; the rocking chairs on the lower level piazza were occupied. I’d barely put the car in Park and Wallis was up and out, headed for the front door.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Bo, dazed. “I’m so sorry for what just happened.”

Bo rolled down his window, and I turned off the engine. Outside was the kind of soggy, fecund air loved by bugs; it smelled of early summer, of perfume and brine, and of what Bo had called earlier that day pluff mud. Bo passed his phone back and forth between his hands, quiet.

“This weekend,” I said. In the house, the music stopped, and a new song came on, a popular one, apparently, as indicated by the cheers of the guests. “This was supposed to be about your family. It became about Blake Darley, and about Wallis. I suspected something like this would happen. I’m sorry, Bo.”

“You can’t control Wallis, or whom she falls in love with. But I can’t help—” He paused. “Seeing Blake tonight, with all those other dudes, his bros, brought back some not so great feelings about how boys like that treated me. Continue to treat me. Wallis is...” He exhaled. “I can’t believe she’d love a man like that. But also, I know exactly why she’d love a guy like that.”

“He wasn’t that way, initially,” I said. “Or at least he just hid it well.”

“We fall in love with the wrong people all the time.”

Yes, I agreed silently, thinking of my love for a man who didn’t love me back.

I became conscious of just how much I didn’t want to get out of the car. I wasn’t usually fond of conversations in vehicles—too enclosed, too difficult to find the right point to end it and open the door, never an opportunity to say, simply, okay, then, talk to you later. But here, in this car, I wanted to loop time around my finger to keep it from going anywhere. To leave would be to reckon with what had happened in the bar, and back, to when my sister had fallen in love with a Darley who claimed, just as my father had, to be honest, to be a different kind of man. And even further, to the impromptu party my father had thrown when I got my college acceptance letter—had he known, then, when we were eating cake with our hands, dancing in the kitchen, how he would be paying for it? Had I, in some unknown, entitled way, pressured him into this choice?

“What are you going to do?” Bo asked, straightening.