“Are you bored? Did you think if you fucked the murder victim’s brother, you could be the center of attention again? To leech more attention off my brother, off Sarah?” He was yelling everything now. The house caught his words and tossed them from wall to wall, room to room. His own voice becoming his applause, fortifying him. “How dare you do this to my family?”

From a young age, Lily learned that the most important thing for her to be was agreeable. This message came daily from the world, but first from her mother. Even her rage was shellacked, buried under a thick coating of bashful eyelashes and punctual thank-you notes. Made so beautiful it was hard to recognize as toxic, until it was too late.

But Lily wasn’t her mother’s charm school Cinderella anymore. Neither was she seventeen, pregnant and terrified, nor deep in the lull of the Forgetting Years. For the first time in her life, she realized, she was standing steady, all on her own.

She had just as much claim to this life, this family, as he did. Maybe more.

She stepped up to Silas, even though there was barely any room left between them.

“You want to know the truth?” she spat. “Fine. Do you have any idea how it feels to watch your husband fall more and more in love with a dead girl? Even after you’ve given him two children, even after you’ve dug deep into the trenches with him, had his back through everything? Don’t act surprised; of course I knew about you and Sarah. But I don’t give a shit about who you loved back then. Not anymore. What I can’t stand is how now, year after year, you’ve pulled away from me in favor of a ghost. There is nothing more dehumanizing than being chosen by the man you adore for nothing but a beating heart and a positive pregnancy test.”

Silas went quiet. “Lil, you can’t really—”

“There is no competing with someone who died in high school, Silas. No one can live up to a good memory.”

Silas opened his mouth to speak, but Lily cut him off, the words she always dreaded flying freely now.

“So yes, I’m fucking Gavin Kelly. Not only that, but I’m in love with him. So in love, it’s clear I never knew what it meant before. Not because of his sister, or you, or anyone else. For the first time in my life, I’m thinking about my own wants. And every day I wake up and all I want is him.”

And there it was. The reaction she wanted. Silas’s face was the thing of her angriest fantasies: a look of absolute shock. She thought she would enjoy it but found, rippingly, that she didn’t.

Just then, Mickey and Ruth came flying down the stairs.