It’s eight-thirty when Stephen comes into the kitchen to get more ice for the Scotch. He sees that Mona’s already drunk, waving around a smudged glass of white wine. He counts the empties by the sink—the women are four bottles into a case of nice sauvignon. If they’re going to swill something, he wishes they’d pick a fifty-dollar vintage. But rather than say anything snide and risk Mona’s ire, he just retrieves his ice and retreats. Mona, in the middle of some complicated, adoring story about Alexis’s basketball team, ignores her husband.

Stephen heads down the darkened hall, proceeding toward the tiki torches of the patio, when a thick outline fills the doorway, backlit against flickering orange. That saunter, those shoulders: Trey. The low rumble of men at one end of the hall and the high chitter of women at the other enter the corridor and collide in the air above them. Both men slow as they move together, as the space between them shrinks.

Stephen is not sure he has forgiven Trey for Monday’s revelations, what felt like two betrayals. But he also is not sure how to stay angry at the man. The past decade, outside of his family, it is this friendship that he holds most dear. They have shared so much.

“The wife thatta way?” Even Trey’s inflection is Stephen’s, down to the now-deliberate extra syllables, WASPy affects picked up by one man, then passed to the other. It’s like a mynah bird spouting its new vocabulary. But all at once Stephen is uncertain if he should be proud of his pupil or if the creature is mocking him with its chirps. If the mimicker mimics—

Stephen shakes the thought from his mind. This is Trey. Trey. His friend, his confidant. In another world, if this hallway were endless, not opening onto wives and colleagues, he would take this man in his arms. So why would Trey speak to him with malice? Stephen has no answer, just as he can think of no reason Trey would do something as deceitful as not telling him about the boy. Monday must have been a mistake, some disturbance in the air.

He tilts his head back toward the kitchen. “Yes. But she’s in one of those moods.” They chuckle, understanding. “Consider yourself warned.”

Once Trey’s down the hall Stephen backtracks, stopping a few feet shy of the kitchen, still in the shadow of the corridor. He listens from the dark as Trey thanks Mona for her hospitality and begins an excuse about heading home. Stephen peers around the doorjamb just in time to see her grab his bicep, her fingers not even close to making it around his arm, but squeezing her bony hand like she’s determined to make it happen, regardless. The ice in Stephen’s bucket rattles and he worries someone might hear him, but no one turns.