“Wow. No. Stop. Do not make the word listen or my name sound like you think I’m being unreasonable.”

“Come on, I’m sorry. It’s not like I put a camera in the bedroom or near the bathroom or anything. Nobody’s naked in the foyer.”

“Obviously I have no idea where there might be a camera in my house. So where they’re not is hardly the point.”

John’s hand came up, defensive, placating. “I know. I know.”

“I don’t think you do.”

John let his hands fall back to his sides, his shoulders loose under the weight of defeat. Or at least to look defeated, Carly thought, and cocked her head in concentration.

“What do you want me to say?” he asked. “Where do you want me to start?”

Surprise, like a little pinch, startled Carly. She looked at her mother and saw that Donna hadn’t heard him all the way. Her mother didn’t realize it wasn’t a rhetorical question. It was bait. John wanted her to tell him what would fix this. But no. Filling in the blanks would be less like explaining himself and a lot more like scratching where her mother said it itched.

Carly’s focus went wide and she looked into the thousand-yard distance, listening to the two of them. The match struck and went into the tinder. The argument burst into flames while Carly sorted out how different her mother’s unfiltered, uncalculated upset sounded from her stepfather’s precision in answering her.

•  •  •

The call came in the middle of their fight. The police had caught the young man who had pushed his way into the house. Carly wasn’t supposed to hear that the boy had a knife in his pocket when they’d found him, but her mother, putting the phone on speaker, the angry conversation with John on pause, had hit the button too late.

Carly couldn’t decide how to feel. The fact of his knife bumped up against the fact of her win. More danger made her mother sag with breathy talk of “so incredibly fortunate.” Carly didn’t want luck to make it seem like she cheated. It didn’t change anything. The freak never got to his pocket.

Carly could tell by how fast and scattershot her mother was yelling at John that it was more convenient for her to be furious than to think about what other night they could all be having right now. They’d all be doing something different—in a police station or in a hospital or someplace worse—if it had gone another way. Carly understood because she didn’t want to think about any of that stuff either.

But she found it hard to be mad at John, even though he was wrong and being somehow really weird about it. He should have told them. That was true. He should have asked.