Like Halloween, the Thanksgiving meal had been a massive get-together in years past. Now, there were a few locals who came to have their dinner at Carrigan’s, but the dining room (and the guest rooms) was mostly empty. The table, however, was overfull of traditional upstate New York food, because, Mrs. Matthews argued, it tasted better than Thanksgiving food.

“I appreciate your refusal to bow to cultural norms,” Cole said, surveying the dishes.

“We secretly hate Thanksgiving,” Mr. Matthews whispered.

“It’s not a secret,” Hannah whispered back.

“Thanksgiving,” Noelle grumbled, “is the darkest day of the year. It’s racist, the food is terrible, and you have to spend enforced time with your family, watching grown men get serious head injuries for fun and profit. It’s a perfect storm of bad vibes.”

“We used to have fun Thanksgivings with the Rosensteins,” Hannah said, pushing potatoes around on her plate, “but Miriam never got to come.”

“I don’t think we were invited,” Miriam admitted, her eyes on her plate, her voice small.

“I’m sure you were,” Hannah told her, “because the aunts and uncles all complained every year that you weren’t there.”

“I wish we’d have come. Instead we would go to one of dad’s associates’ houses.”

“Not fun?” Noelle guessed.

Miriam huffed out a cynical laugh. “At the party, no matter where he was in the room, Dad was watching. If we did anything he deemed unacceptable—even if we’d done it a thousand times before, even if he’d told us to do it—there would be hell to pay. Driving home afterward, I’d never know what I’d done wrong, but I always knew he was going to find something. And there were going to be consequences. Sometimes, it was only the silent treatment. Sometimes he pulled money from things he’d promised or canceled my afterschool activities or threw out my favorite stuffy while I was at school. Once, after I’d worn a bow on the wrong side of my head, he sold my horse. It was always inventive.

“It would have been great to know we were invited to the Rosensteins,” Miriam concluded, twisting her napkin. “I thought they didn’t want us. To be fair, I didn’t blame them for not wanting to invite Dad.”

“If your dad was at odds with the Rosensteins, why did he come to Carrigan’s? He must have hated Cass most of all,” Noelle asked. She’d wanted to understand Miriam’s childhood, and now she almost wished she knew less. The idea of this funny, creative, sensitive woman as a little girl in a house that tried to break her made Noelle want to cry into her gravy.