Through the floorboards I heard Kelli’s muted, blissful heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. And a murmuring, indistinct remark from Brenna before the water turned on and started thundering through the pipes, drowning them both out.

This was stupid, I decided, irritated. This weird, ape-like display of dominance in the kitchen. It was all about Trevor feeling he had lost face in some indistinct way with Brenna. And he was trying to get it back by undermining me. Brenna had torn a strip off him for some reason, and he didn’t like it. His masculine pride had made him all fist-bunchy, and now he hoped to drag me into it, get me onside, make me suspicious of the very people who’d been holding my and my sister’s lives together these past few weeks.

“Trevor,” I said. “Thank you. But I can’t go through life distrusting everyone just because I don’t know them —”

“I’m not saying distrust everyone,” insisted Trevor. “I’m just saying you need to be careful. And you need to be smart.”

“Trevor —”

“You’re all by yourself now, Miss Karie. And you need to be careful.”

He said this last thing with a certainty that somehow knocked the fight out of me. I stood there feeling almost winded.

Trevor saw what was happening to my face — that it was getting blotchy, that I had started blinking rapidly — and his own face softened and relaxed. He wasn’t upset with me anymore, and his demeanour became almost fatherly. Actually, I realized, the entire conversation had been fatherly.

“Just remember you got friends,” he said. “Real friends you can count on. Not people you pay money to for services fuckin rendered. Pardon my French.”

Trevor made a gesture then. To this day, I don’t know how to describe this gesture. That is, I don’t know how to describe the intention behind it. He took his hands out of his pockets, finally, and exposed his palms to me — they were shiny and disconcertingly smooth, as if he’d sanded them like pieces of wood. Then he raised them and let them hover before my eyes a moment, like he were a saint displaying his stigmata. Finally he took another step toward me and extended them. I stepped back and felt my ass bump against the counter.

“Dad!” yelled Mike from the foyer. He barked it like the word had been sitting there swelling in his throat, and he’d had to yell to keep it from asphyxiating him.

“Coming, goddamnit!” Trevor bawled. He smiled at me. “We’ll have a proper visit soon.”

12

“Hi Miz Petrie dear and how are you today?” The question came out, despite the dear, as clipped, impatient, too busy for the usual social niceties. I’d never met Margot in person, but over the phone, at least, it struck me that she had a personality similar to Brenna’s — terse and no-nonsense — and I wondered if the ladies of Bestlife were all versions of one another, an assembly line of short, squarish-yet-pillowy middle-aged women who, despite their soft exteriors and the occasional dear, were tough enough to step to a guy like Trevor and look him up and down.