Lindsay snorted, and both men turned to her in surprise, but she just stared back at them.

“I’m okay,” Will said quickly. “I don’t need anything. Thanks, Mr. Finch, Mrs. Finch.”

He walked through the dining room and into the room they used as a library and den. It was lined with bookshelves that reached fifteen feet high. A ladder on rollers slid across the floor to give access to the upper reaches of the shelves. Will browsed the books, pulling out the ones that caught his eye and flipping to the copyright pages. There were first editions of Steinbeck and Faulkner, and even a pristine first printing of Hemingway. Dom had shown some of them to Will before, waxing poetic about his days reading literature at Princeton. Will wondered how many of these he would have to sell to fund a year of college. Probably not too many.

From the kitchen he could hear the sounds of Lindsay’s and Dom’s voices, at first muted and then clearer. When he heard Hunter’s name mentioned, he slid the book he was looking at back onto the shelf and passed quietly into the hallway.

“He wasn’t going with us anyway,” Lindsay said.

“Just because he wasn’t going with us doesn’t mean I can just leave him here,” Dom replied, his voice impatient. “Who’s going to manage the attorneys?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Lindsay replied, her voice uncharacteristically sarcastic. “They’re representing Hunter, so maybe he can manage them? He’s an adult. He should take responsibility for his actions.”

This was the second time in the last hour that Will had heard that, and he gave a dry laugh without thinking. All of a sudden they were adults. It’s funny that no one had treated them like adults before all this. In the kitchen the voices were suddenly quiet. Will stayed still, and soon they started up again, apparently satisfied it was just the old house sighing.

“Being eighteen is different than being an adult,” Dom said. “But I’m not trying to defend him. I’m just saying this is not a good time for us to spend a month on a yacht in the middle of the Aegean Sea, where I won’t be able to keep an eye on things.”

“So now you’re keeping an eye on things,” Lindsay replied, her voice reckless. “That’s great. I’ve been dealing with this all year, trying to keep it together here while you’re at work eighteen hours a day, but now you’re keeping an eye on things. And that means the kids and I will be stuck here, in this creaky old house, all summer. When we were supposed to be traveling.”