Finn is silent for a moment. “Yeah, I do,” she says finally. “I really, really want Dallas to suffer.”

Tanya nods. She knows the dark pull of revenge, and has fought to keep it at bay – not just with Dallas but with her entire life. If someone hurts you, you hurt them right back, and you think it will make you feel better, but it doesn’t. It just makes you angrier because not only have you been hurt but now you’ve also lost control.

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. Her life may seem small, sparse, insignificant, but it is hers. Just as Dallas is hers. Finn has no idea how hard Tanya has fought for everything she has. Why can’t she understand that she only wants to protect the life she has made? How far she is willing to go to do that?

“It’s okay,” the boy says suddenly. They turn to look at him, still sitting on the couch. He is playing with a small ball, like the kind you get out of a machine at the grocery store when you put in a quarter. It is blue and sparkly and probably will bounce very high. But he isn’t bouncing it – he is cradling it in his hands and talking to it as if it were a pet. Then he puts it down on the coffee table and gives it a little nudge, so that it rolls away from him.

“Come here, ball,” he says. “Don’t run away. Come back here.”

The ball rolls off the edge of the table and lands on a dirty white athletic sock that Dallas has left on the floor. Ross sits back on the couch and folds his hands in his lap, waiting for the ball to come back to him of its own free will.

—

A month earlier, Tanya had been walking by the house on Victor Street – something she did, now and then, when she and Dallas had had a fight. The house was too far back from the road for her to see in the windows, but she could see the yard, the cars in the front, the door to the garage where the salon was. Sometimes someone would drive by and turn into the driveway and she would stare at the back of the vehicle until the lights turned off. This time she saw the boy walking down the driveway with a three-legged husky who might have been the world’s oldest dog.

“I like your dog,” she said, when he reached the road. “What’s his name?”

The boy eyed her warily. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

“I’m not a stranger,” said Tanya. “I’m a friend of your dad’s.”

“My new dad or my real dad?”