“Even now—when it is more important than ever that you listen to me—you won’t. When our family and our life hinges on you listening to me—you still won’t.” She was screaming now. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t plan on this and it is more than I can even understand of myself and—”

A flash of silver gleamed from under the pile he’d just kicked. Her stomach lurched up, forward: the discarded necklace.

Phil leaned down and picked it up. “What is this?”

“He was here today . . . came today.” She had nothing left in her but the truth.

“Son of a bitch.” He turned to her, the necklace dangling between his fingers. “Some guy from your past comes sauntering in like a beer-drinking frat boy, all cool and tall and suave, and you forget everything. Me, Molly, Jack.”

“It wasn’t like that. I thought he left . . . and then I found out—”

“I don’t give a shit. I don’t care what you did or did not know. You allowed him to come in here and destroy us.”

Destroy us. She heard the words and fought against them.

“I made him leave. I told him to leave and never come back. He didn’t destroy us. I made him go . . . told him I loved you.”

Phil looked down at the necklace in his hand and held it out. And for the second time that day, she refused to take it.

Phil dropped it on the hall table and turned away.

She shuddered. “Don’t go. . . .”

“I’ll go pick up Molly from tennis, bring her home for dinner.” He walked away from her.

“Phil.”

He stopped. “What?”

“What can I do? What can I do to prove to you . . . ?”

“Nothing. There is nothing you can do.”

And the words were so hopeless, so full of uncompromising authority; she slumped back onto the clothes, empty. If there was nothing she could do . . . what then?

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-one

The emotional elements of the family became more than Amy could face, so she lost herself in the material aspects of their life. Closets, organization, facts—these became her primary concern. She sat on the foyer floor, folding the last strewn pile from Phil’s and her fight three days before—she had been dodging the evidence from the afternoon her husband told her there was nothing she could do. Although she’d immediately cleaned up the broken mirror, she’d been avoiding the rest of the mess in the foyer: the scattered books, the clothes and the necklace. Now she would pack them away. She lifted the necklace from the table and held it up to the light, then opened the drawer to the hall table and stuffed it into the dark.