“Wrong. I knew exactly what would happen if I told you about Brad. You’d have come out to Los Angeles. You’d have seen me strung out—just like you did yesterday. Don’t lie, Myron. Not now. You’d want to do what you thought was right again. You’d have petitioned the court for custody. You’d say—just like you did yesterday—that I’m an irresponsible junkie, unfit to raise Mickey. You’d have taken my boy away from me. Don’t deny it.”

He wouldn’t. “So your answer was to pretend that Brad was still alive?”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“And to hell with Mickey and what he needed?”

“He needed his mother. How do you not get that?”

But he did. He remembered how Mickey kept telling him what a great mother she was. “And what about us? What about Brad’s family?”

“What family? Mickey and I are his family. None of you had been a part of his life in fifteen years.”

“And whose fault was that?”

“Exactly, Myron. Whose?”

He said nothing. He thought it was hers. She thought it was his. And his father . . . how had he put it? We come out a certain way. Brad, Dad had said, wasn’t meant to stay home and settle down.

But Dad had based that belief on Myron’s lie.

“I know you don’t believe this. I know you think I lied and tricked him into running away with me. Maybe I did. But it was the right choice. Brad was happy. We were both happy.”

Myron remembered the photographs, the face-splitting smiles. He had thought that they were a lie, that the happiness he’d seen in those pictures was an illusion. They weren’t. On that part, Kitty was right.

“So yeah, that was my plan. Just to delay notification until I straightened myself out.”

Myron just shook his head.

“You want me to apologize,” Kitty said, “but I won’t. Sometimes you do the right things and you get the wrong results. And sometimes, well, look at Suzze. She tried to sabotage my career by switching those birth control pills—and because of that I have Mickey. Don’t you get that? It’s all chaos. It’s not about right or wrong. You hold on to the things you love most. I lost the love of my life to a freak accident. Was that fair? Was that right? And maybe if you’d been kinder, Myron. Maybe if you had accepted us I would have come to you for help.”