“Did you move in with Mom?” I asked, to stall.

“Rini wanted me to,” said Trevor, “but we ended up having a tiff about that. I wanted to pay rent and she wasn’t having it. So I told her until she came to her senses, I’d be holding on to my place.” Trevor leaned forward and clasped his hands. “That’s what I want you to understand, Karie. I pull my own weight. We’re partners in this. I do for you and you do for me.”

I took a breath, as deeply as I could without opening my mouth or letting my shoulders rise too explicitly. I needed to seem calm. I needed to keep him calm. I needed to change the subject, but I also needed to assert some kind of authority in this situation. I kept my face neutral but my hands in my lap felt like frozen, knuckly chunks of meat.

“We need to talk about,” I said, “what happened this morning.”

Trevor leaned back. “That was not my finest hour.”

“I don’t know what that was,” I said. “But it can’t happen again.”

“I guess I was just trying to move things forward,” Trevor explained. “I was a dummy. I’m a man, I had to make a move. You can’t blame a guy for trying.”

He didn’t put it down to being drunk. He wasn’t even bothering to pretend that he’d been drunk anymore. He was pretending something else now. Trevor, I wanted to say, you are not attracted to me and you know it. I understood this with more clarity than I understood anything else about the situation.

“Won’t happen again,” promised Trevor. Then he amended the promise. “We’ll take things slow.”

And everything did become slow, from that moment forward — unbearably slow, the way people describe experiencing car crashes and other inexorable disasters. The three of us sat together in the living room as the morning ticked away while Trevor elaborated on what our futures together held. Sometimes I felt like my mind was racing, whereas other times it felt as if it had completely shut down. In the racing moments I mostly wondered why it wasn’t giving me anything — some kind of strategy. I’d always thought that in a crisis, a person’s mind was supposed to sharpen, become focused. But then I realized what the problem was. I was focused — entirely focused on Trevor. His sunburned forearms and his gingery five o’clock shadow. His lordly, spread-legged couch-sprawl and bloodshot eyes. I’d become hyper-vigilant, and that was taking up the entirety of my mental bandwidth — helplessly fixated on Trevor’s every flinch and utterance.

The sticking point was Kelli. I could bolt, maybe, when his back was turned, when he stepped into the hallway bathroom to “drain the dragon” (as he liked to announce), but Kelli could not. Kelli took work to dislodge — which Trevor knew. If I took off on my own, if I defied or angered him, he’d go for her. He had already showed me that. I didn’t know what he’d do, exactly, but I knew that much. He’d turn to Kelli. That was the threat.