Of course I wouldn’t know anything about that. The whole thing with Leo is now so clearly unimportant and childish and silly. I didn’t love Leo. I liked him, sure, and I loved the idea of him, and that’s not the same. But I believed that true love existed, out there in the world, that it was a real thing. That it was possible. I believed that because of Mom and Pop.

They got married at a vineyard in wine country when I was eight years old and Afton was ten and Abby didn’t exist yet. It was sunny that day, and the air smelled of lavender. Mom wore a simple white cotton dress, a circle of wildflowers pinned to the crown of her head, and cowboy boots because she thought they would be funny and more comfortable than heels. She smiled all day long, from morning until night, even when she knew she was having her picture taken. Mom hates to smile for pictures because she thinks smiling makes her eyes get small and squinty. Her doctor profile picture on the hospital website, for example, is of her staring almost solemnly at the camera, her eyes as wide as they’ll go, her lips turning up in the tiniest possible version of a smile. But that day, on her wedding day, she smiled with her teeth.

I wonder if Mom smiles at this other man like that. I don’t want to imagine it, even though I’ve seen her doing so much worse. There’s a part of my brain that refuses to accept that what happened this morning was real. It was dark in there, this part of me whispers urgently in the back of my mind. Maybe I didn’t see what I thought I saw. Maybe I misinterpreted it somehow. It tries to make me doubt everything, because it wants to cling to the stubborn belief that Mom would never cheat on Pop. Mom can be distant sometimes, she can be neglectful in her own distracted intellectual sort of way, and she can be careless with a person’s feelings because feelings are not her forte. But I don’t want to admit that she could be so horribly disloyal to us all, so dishonest, so repulsive and ugly and bad. That’s not her, I keep thinking, over and over. That’s not Mom.

But clearly I’m wrong. Clearly I don’t know my mother at all.

Clearly the promises she made that one sunny day don’t mean anything to her, and there’s nothing I can do about that. I am completely useless. The only thing I can do that has any value is to keep Afton and Abby from finding out. I can protect my sisters. And possibly Pop. If he doesn’t already know.

But maybe this is why he refused to come to Hawaii.

My phone buzzes at my hip. A text from Mom.