His eyebrows lifted.
“I’m coming.”
“No.”
The word was immediate.
Too immediate.
I looked at him.
“Dad.”
“You’re hurt.”
“I’m also tired of people talking about what happened to me while I’m somewhere else.”
That landed.
Dad nodded slowly.
“All right.”
Mom stayed beside me as I stood.
The garage spun briefly.
Dad reached for my elbow.
“I’ve got you.”
“I know.”
For the first time that night, those words meant what they were supposed to mean.
We found Mason at the kitchen island.
He was staring at his phone.
The engagement party flowers crowded the counters behind him.
White roses.
Pale hydrangeas.
Green eucalyptus.
They looked absurd now.
Like decorations from somebody else’s life.
Mason stood when we entered.
“Claire.”
Dad pulled out a chair for me.
I sat.
Mom remained near the doorway.
Mason placed his phone face down on the counter.
“I’m sorry.”
I looked at him.
“How long have you known?”
His expression shifted.
“That he hit you?”
“That something was wrong.”
Mason exhaled.
“A while.”
My chest tightened.
“How long?”
“Maybe four months.”
Mom made a small sound.
Dad folded his arms.
“What did you see?”
Mason looked at me rather than him.
“Ryan changed.”
I almost laughed.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
He rubbed his palms together.
“We’ve known each other since we were nineteen. Ryan always had a temper, but he used to walk away when he got angry.”
“Used to?”
Mason nodded.
“About six months ago he started getting… paranoid.”
That word caught me.
“About what?”
“You.”
I already knew that.
But Mason continued.
“He kept asking us whether we thought you were cheating.”
Dad’s eyes narrowed.
“With whom?”
“That was the strange part. Nobody.”
I looked at Mason.
“What does that mean?”
“He never named anybody. He’d just say you were hiding things.”
Ryan had asked to see my phone so often that I eventually stopped arguing.
He wanted passwords.
Location sharing.
Receipts.
Once he accused me of lying because I stopped for coffee on the way home and forgot to mention it.
“I thought it was jealousy,” Mason said. “Then he started asking me questions about your family.”
Dad leaned forward.
“What questions?”
Mason hesitated.
“About Michael.”
The room went silent.
My eyes went instinctively toward the garage.
“What about my uncle?”
“He wanted to know how he died.”
Dad’s face became unreadable.
“That isn’t a secret.”
Uncle Michael had died when his small plane went down during bad weather six years earlier.
No passengers.
No dramatic mystery.
Just a terrible accident over the northern part of the state.
Mason nodded.
“I know.”
“Then why ask you?”
