You just can’t behave like that,” she told Corey when he got home from school the next afternoon. She’d been stewing about it all night and all day, angry, disappointed and fearful at the same time. He was too young for this. And so was Nancy. Fifteen was the age for first crushes, Valentine’s Day cards and school dances, not a full-blown sexual relationship, if that was what this was—and, really, what else could it be? She’d fought down the impulse to stalk into the room and shake them both awake because that would only have made matters worse. Unnerved, she’d eased the door shut and retreated down the hall in confusion. She hadn’t told anyone yet, not even Fitz—or Susannah, who really should rein in her daughter before something happened that was beyond the power of any of them to repair. Nancy. Nancy, with her eyeliner and lipstick—she was the one who should have known better.

“Behave like what? What’re you talking about?”

She’d taken him aside the minute he burst through the back door and into the kitchen along with Jackie, Tommy and the twins, all of them flushed from the walk home in the chill breeze that was coming down out of the north to put an abrupt end to the Indian summer everybody’d been enjoying practically that whole first month. They’d been tossing a football around, roughhousing, and they were in high spirits, cuffing each other in the meat of the arm and throwing taunts and quips back and forth till the kitchen, big as it was, seemed too small for them. She told him she wanted to speak with him privately—Right now, and don’t give me that look—and then she’d led him up the stairs and down the hall to her room, where he casually tossed his book bag on the bed and fell into the chair by the window as if he’d lost the use of his limbs. His face gave away nothing.

She looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time in weeks. He had her coloring, dark eyes and hair and not a trace of Fitz’s carrot top, and he was growing so fast she saw he’d be needing new pants soon—and she’d just gone out and bought him the current pair not three months ago, at her mother’s. His nails were dirty. His hair needed cutting. There was a crusted-over cut just below his left ear.

“I’m talking about Nancy.”

She could see he was making an effort to keep his eyes on hers, holding his stare to maintain the pretense that he had nothing to hide. “What about her?”