A few days later, the side of the mountain had come down and he and Leanne were separating although he still couldn’t claim to understand why. No one had cheated. No one had maxed out the credit cards and tried to hide it. No one had any objections to the way anyone else had been parenting Mike. As far as Trevor could determine Leanne was walking out because their marriage made her — for reasons she couldn’t even properly articulate no matter how late they stayed up talking and ranting and pacing and sitting with their heads in their hands — sad.

Trevor took a big slurp from his glass and blinked up at the ceiling a few times. His freckles seemed to glow in the lamp light. He looked worn out, like a tired little boy.

“My biggest regret,” he said after a moment. “I never introduced your mom to Mike.”

“You never brought him over?”

“I can’t explain it,” said Trevor. “For the longest time, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want — you know. The two worlds to collide. Mike was part of everything that was going on with Leanne. Not that any of it was his fault. But your mom. And this house . . .”

“I get it,” I said. To teenage me the house had been a steel trap. But to Trevor, like Jessica before him, it was a sanctuary. Fresh bread and lavender. Tea and sympathy. Kelli and Irene.

“Your mom told me,” said Trevor, looking down at the table, “you had a pretty bad breakup yourself.”

It was as if he had reached out and pressed a button on my body — or a bruise. It made me wince but it didn’t exactly make me feel defensive.

“She said she wished you were around for me to talk to,” he continued. “Guess she figured we could compare notes.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again, because I was worried I’d say something that sounded disparaging of Irene in that moment — for example, She knew? She cared? We only spoke a handful of times during my breakup period, and I couldn’t remember much about it except for a flurry of exchanged fines. I also remember feeling shamed, braced for an I told you so, even though I told you so’s had never really been my mother’s style. Still, I felt like I could hear it in her every inconsequential word about Kelli’s latest doctor’s appointment or what St. Joseph’s had in store for their annual Easter pageant that year.

But maybe I had been hearing something else. As much as I tried to keep it to myself during those phone calls, how desolate and unmoored I felt, perhaps Irene had understood. What I remember most is a fuzzy, panicked feeling of not knowing where I stood anymore. A dream I had stands out in my mind — and dreams and days were hard to differentiate back then, but this had to be a dream, because I walked into a room of our house which he had used for an office and found it flooded with summer daylight. The roof had blown off. I figured it must have happened in a storm — a storm I must have slept through, because I’d never noticed it raging. On the one hand, I considered, this couldn’t be a good thing, the roof blowing off the house. I didn’t know how to deal with it, logistically — whom to call, where to begin. On the other hand, it was a beautiful day. Birds and treetops overhead.