Chapter 6: What Ethan Heard
Maya found him at the top of the stairs.
He was sitting on the third step from the landing with his knees pulled up to his chest, still in his school shoes.
His backpack was on the floor beside him.
He hadn't opened it.
Maya sat down next to him.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"You heard," she said.
Ethan nodded.
"How much?"
"Most of it." He wiped his face with the back of his wrist.
"Is Daddy going to leave?"
"I don't know yet."
"Is Mummy going to leave?"
Maya looked at him.
Eight years old, with their mother's eyes and their father's jaw and an expression on his face that was too careful for his age.
"I don't know that either," she said.
"She was going to say it was you," Ethan said.
"The box.
She was going to say it was yours."
"She did say it was mine."
"I told the truth."
"I know you did." Maya put her arm around him.
He leaned into her sideways, the way he'd done since he was four.
"You did the right thing."
He was quiet for a while.
Then: "Is Paul a bad person?"
"He made a very bad choice."
"Is Mummy a bad person?"
Maya looked at the hallway below them — the side table where Diane's papers had been, the locked front door, the strip of light coming under the kitchen door.
"She made a very bad choice too," Maya said.
"Is it different?"
The question was so exact that Maya didn't answer it immediately.
She thought about it.
Really thought about it, the way she would have thought about it for herself if she hadn't been so close to the middle of all of it.
"I think what makes it different for us," she said finally, "is that she's our mum."
Ethan considered that.
"Does that mean we have to forgive her?"
"No," Maya said.
"Not yet.
Maybe not for a long time."
He nodded like that was a reasonable answer.
Like he'd needed someone to confirm it was allowed.
Downstairs, the kitchen door opened.
Richard came into the hallway.
He looked up and saw them both on the stairs.
His face did something that was not quite a smile and not quite grief — some worn, particular blend of the two.
"Ethan," he said.
"Come down and have something to eat."
Ethan uncurled himself, picked up his backpack, and went down the stairs.
When he passed his father, Richard put a hand briefly on his shoulder.
Ethan didn't stop walking, but he didn't pull away either.
Richard looked up at Maya.
"You too," he said.
She went down.
Nicole was still in the kitchen, seated at the table.
She had made tea — three cups, a fourth set to the side.
She hadn't touched her own.
Nobody had asked her to make tea.
She had done it anyway, the way people reach for familiar actions when all the unfamiliar ones have collapsed.
Ethan sat down.
He looked at the cup in front of him.
He looked at his mother.
Nicole looked back at him.
"Thank you for telling the truth," she said.
Her voice was very careful, the way you speak when you know you don't deserve to be heard.
"I know that was hard."
Ethan picked up his cup.
"It wasn't that hard," he said.
"It was just the truth."
Maya sat down.
Richard sat down.
The four of them were at the kitchen table with their cups of tea and the particular silence of a family that had been cracked open and was not yet sure what would come out.
It wasn't peace.
It was something rawer than that.
But no one left the table.
Richard wrapped both hands around his cup.
He looked at Nicole across the rim of it.
"I have two questions," he said.
"I'm only going to ask them once."
Nicole nodded.
"Are you keeping it?"
She hesitated.
"I don't know yet."
Richard's jaw moved.
"Second question.
Did it ever — at any point — mean anything to you?
The twenty-two years."
Nicole looked at her cup.
Her ring was still on her finger, still catching the light.
"Yes," she said.
"Every day of it."
"Then I need you to explain to me," Richard said, "how someone who loves their family can look their daughter in the eye and say what you said today."
The question sat in the middle of the table like the fourth cup of tea — made, placed there, not yet touched.
Nicole opened her mouth.
And then her phone, face-up on the counter, lit up with a message.
Richard saw the name on the screen before anyone else did.
He stood up.
He walked to the counter.
He read the message.
He set the phone back down, face-down this time.
When he turned around, something in his expression had changed in a way that the earlier conversation hadn't managed.
"He wants you to meet him tonight," Richard said.
May you like
Maya watched her mother's face.
What she saw there was not surprise.
