“Will you please move back in our room? Please?” Pleading came first and tears formed when she had thought she had no more.

“No . . . you aren’t ready.”

“Stop saying that. Stop saying it’s me.” She stood and grabbed Phil’s arm. “That’s not what I meant to say. I just want you to . . . hear me.”

“Hear you?”

She sighed and shuddered. “Yes.”

“Go ahead, Amy. Go ahead.” He turned and his face was set, his teeth rubbing back and forth as his jawline tensed from one side to the other.

There he was—ready to listen, and when she opened her mouth nothing came out.

“What is it?” he asked.

And she resorted to ingrained habit—letting him take care of everything. “What can I do? I just can’t stand this.”

Phil leaned down suddenly and picked up a neatly stacked pile of clothes, then another, and flung them across the foyer. Clothes scattered on the floor, on the steps, the entrance of the parlor.

He looked at her. “What can you do?” He reached down into a box of discarded books and grabbed a Stephen King hardcover, heaved it across the foyer. He bent to pick up another book as the first one slammed into the mirror over the hall table. Glass shards flew onto the floor, onto the table, across Jack’s old clothes.

He turned to her, held a large dictionary above his head. “There is nothing, nothing you can do. You already did it.”

He reached his arm behind him like a pitcher ready to release a fastball, tossed the book against the steps. The binding of the dictionary popped and pages fluttered to the floor.

She stared at the pieces of shattered mirror, broken pieces of her home on the floor: shattered and broken family. Rage washed over his face, his body; the waves of it reached her and she covered her face with her hands.

“Stop. Just listen to me. Just listen to me.” She spoke the words she’d wanted to say a thousand times, a million times, and like stagnant water released from a cracked dam, the phrases came pouring out. “I’m sorry. I got lost . . . lonely and I didn’t mean to do this. God, I am so sorry and alone. I just wanted someone to listen, to understand . . . to—I don’t know. And there he was. There he was—all listening and helping and understanding, and I got lost in it, in the past. It’s not an excuse—I just want you to hear it. It has nothing to do with how much I love you—or Molly and Jack.”

“Bullshit.” It was the first time he’d ever cursed at her. “It has everything to do with how much you love us. How . . . how in the hell could you do this to us? To them . . . to me?”