The questions she’d carried, baggage as heavy as the rocks that they’d piled at the water’s edge to keep the river from encroaching onto the soft earth of their backyard, rose again. How did you two get together? How did you fool me? How?

But now, with her sister in front of her, Colleen dug into the debris of the past for different words. “I just want to help Dad. Not fight with you. Please.”

Hallie’s stunned expression was no different from the one when she’d been discovered in that tiny alcove room with Walter—pain and shame melding together with half-closed eyes and quivering lips. “What?”

“I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to be mad and sad. I don’t want to have to run away from the home I love so very much. I’m exhausted of it all. Let’s just accept that we will never be close again—but we can be polite. That has to be good enough.”

Shane slammed his hand on the table, the photos scattering. “No, that is not good enough. Not good enough at all.”

Hallie bent, plucked up a fallen photo and placed it gently on the table. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out; she slumped back defeated, her cheeks red as if she’d just finished running a race.

Colleen stood then. “I think I need to go.” She felt it—the urge thrusting her out the door. Run. Get out. Don’t look. It was a voice she’d been heeding for a long time.

Shane placed his hand on her shoulder. “You are not leaving here, Lena.”

Colleen hugged him and grabbed a photo of her dad and Aunt Rosalind from the pile. “I’ll take this one. But right now I am leaving. I don’t want to fight or talk. I can’t. I’m going to the house. This evening I’ll bring Dad to the pub instead of Bob.”

•   •   •

Gavin routinely arrived at the pub by three thirty in the afternoon. His days had always belonged to his family, but the evenings eternally belonged to the Lark. Other dads were present for their kids at bedtime and for soccer games and ballet recitals, but Colleen, Hallie and Shane had considered themselves lucky because their dad was around for breakfast and rides to school, for lunches and summer mornings on the johnboat.

And of course the pub belonged to all of them.