“Then who?”
The dishwasher was running. That’s the detail my brain kept. The dishwasher was on the pots cycle and it was the loudest thing in the room.
Ava said, “Uncle Grant.”
Daniel didn’t move.
Then he laughed. Not cruelly. It was worse than cruel. It was the laugh of a man whose brain has been handed a sentence it cannot file, and it came out of him for about a second and a half and then died in his mouth when he saw his daughter’s face.
“Ava,” he said. “Grant?”
“Since April.”
“Since April last year?”
“Since April last year.”
He stood up. He put both hands on the back of a chair. I watched him try three different sentences and abandon all of them.
I could see him going backward through eleven months at speed. Every barbecue. Every time Grant offered to drive her. The weekend at the lake house that Daniel had described to me afterward as the best one in years. The club team she quit in September, where Daniel had made an appointment to complain to a coach who had done nothing wrong.
His face when he got to the coach was the worst part.
