“Please stop calling him boy,” she said tightly.

Mike glanced over at her.

Toby kicked the back of her seat. “I’m a kid. Mike’s my friend. He can call me whatever he wants.”

Toby was David’s son, and she wasn’t backing down on this one. “No, he can’t.” As she looked over her shoulder at him, she saw Star’s thickly lashed golden brown eyes staring back at her. “That word has a negative connotation—a bad association—in the African-American community.”

Mike flinched, finally catching on, but Toby grew more belligerent. “So what? I don’t live in the African-American community. I live on Charity Island.”

How had she, the whitest of white women, become responsible for instilling racial pride in David Wheeler’s son?

Mike, who’d started the whole thing, concentrated on pulling out of the parking lot. She plodded on. “White people used to call black men—even elderly men—‘boy.’ It was a way of making them feel inferior. It’s very insensitive.”

Toby thought about it for a moment and, no surprise, curled his lip at her. “Mike’s my friend. He didn’t mean to be insensitive. That’s just the way he is.”

Mike shook his head. “No, Bree’s right. I apologize, Toby. I keep forgetting.”

Forgetting to deal with his racism or forgetting Toby was half African-American?

“So what?” Toby muttered. “I’m white, too, and I don’t see what’s the big deal.”

“The big deal,” she said stubbornly, “is that your father was proud of his heritage, and I want you to feel the same way.”

“If he was so proud, why did he marry my mom?”

Because Star had always wanted whatever Bree had.

“Your dad was crazy about your mom,” Mike said. “And she was just as crazy about him, right up to the end. Your mom could make your dad laugh like nobody else, and he got her to read books she wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. I wish you could have seen the way they looked at each other. Like nobody else existed.”

He might as well have slapped her. And he wasn’t done. “It took them a while to realize how much they loved each other,” he said, an unfamiliar toughness clipping his words. “At first Bree was your dad’s girlfriend, but let me tell you, he never looked at her the way he looked at your mother.”

The real Mike Moody, with his calculated cruelty, had finally resurfaced. He kept his eyes on the road. “We’ll drop Bree off at the cottage so she can get her work done, and then I’ll take you to Dogs ’N’ Malts. That okay with you, Bree?”

All she could manage was the barest nod.