I stared at her, shaking my head. I knew in my gut that she had seen Paul’s text the previous night. Just as she had seen Brenda’s text, and never warned me. She knew Paul would be there that morning, knew I would come home to this ambush. I had never spoken to Ashley like that before. I didn’t recognize myself. And in that moment I didn’t recognize her either.

Your phone is dead, I said, mocking.

It is.

Show me.

No.

Show me your phone.

I’m not a child.

No, you’re a liar.

She set her jaw, just as Paul returned from the kitchen holding the espresso machine with both arms—I’m going to need someone to help me unload the boxes on the other end.

I’m coming with you, Ashley said. Lemme just grab my bag.

She bounded up the stairs towards her room.

Ashley, come on, I called up after her. Your father has no second bed, no bedding, no kitchen supplies.

I looked at the espresso machine in his arms—Well, no useful kitchen supplies.

I can host her for a few days, Paul said. Maybe she just needs some space.

Well a studio apartment doesn’t have much of it.

I don’t think it’s healthy for her to be here right now, with you like this, and with him hanging around.

With me like what? What am I like?

In a cult! Ashley shouted down from upstairs.

I felt like she had just slapped me across the face. A cult. Before I could reply, Paul said—Let’s call a spade a spade, Claire.

I’m sorry, what?

You believe in a totally illogical delusion.

Paul, you believe in talking snakes and the parting of the Red Sea and a God who somehow has a son who he sent down to Earth to be born to a virgin woman—

Okay, okay—

No really, how many people have to believe for it to stop being a delusion? If I’m in a cult, you’re in a far bigger and more fucked-up one than I am.

You’ve completely—he made a spinning gesture with his hand to signify that I had unravelled, I suppose, that I was spinning out of control—I mean look at you, look at this place.

She just threw a fucking party, I said.

With underage drinking and adults nowhere to be seen.

As we argued, I thought, Was this really what Paul and Ashley had been thinking all along? That I was in a cult? I found this completely astonishing. For them to say this was to suggest there had been some disjuncture in the continuity of my being. I was not, in their eyes, fundamentally the same person they once knew. I couldn’t be. Not if they truly believed their accusation.