“Maybe Dad’s in the mob,” Duff speculates a little while later, eyes dry now, mouth full. “And he was about to blow the whistle on the whole thing and—”

“Shut the heck up, Duff! Daddy’s not in the mob! He’s not even Italian!” Andy shouts.

“There’s a Chinese mob and a—”

“Knock it off! You’re just being stupid and annoying on purpose.” Now Andy bursts into tears.

“Guys,” Jase begins.

“Be. Quiet. Now,” Alice says in a flat voice so deadly, everyone freezes.

George puts his head down on the table, covering his ears. Patsy points an accusing finger at Alice and says, “Butt!” Duff sticks his tongue out at Andy, who glares back at him. My Garretts are in chaos.

There’s a long silence, broken by sobs from George.

“I want Daddy,” he howls. “I don’t like you, Alice. You’re a big meanie. I want Mommy and Daddy. We need to get Daddy out of the hostible. He’s not safe there. He could get an air bubble in his IV. He could get bad medicine. He could get a mean nurse who is a murderer.”

“Buddy.” Jase scoops George up. “That’s not gonna happen.”

“How do you know?” George asks fiercely, his legs dangling. “D’you promise?”

Jase shuts his eyes, rubs one hand on George’s little pointy-sharp shoulder blade. “Promise.”

But I can see that George doesn’t believe him.

Worn out, Patsy falls asleep in her high chair, her rosy cheek drooping into a smear of tomato sauce. George and Harry watch a very unlikely movie about a bunch of baby dinosaurs having adventures in the tropics. Alice heads back to the ICU. I call Mom to tell her I won’t be home for dinner. She answers from some loud place with lots of laughter in the background. “That’s okay, sweetheart, I’m at a meet-and-greet at the Tidewater anyway. So many more people showed up than we expected. It’s a huge success!”

Her voice is even and cheerful, no tension there at all. It must be a coincidence, has to be, that bump in the night and Mr. Garrett. There can’t be any connection. If I brought it up, I’d sound crazy.

She raised us to be conscientious. The worst thing Tracy and I could do was lie: “What you did was wrong, but lying about it made it a hundred times worse” was a speech so familiar, we could have set it to music.

Chapter Forty-one

Dishes clatter and crash when I call in to Breakfast Ahoy to quit, the next day. I can hear Ernesto swearing about the unusually big morning rush as I tell Felipe that I won’t be coming back in. He’s incredulous. Yeah, I know, it’s completely unlike me to quit without notice. Much less at the height of the summer season. But the Garretts need me.

“No creo que se pueda volver y recuperar su trabajo,” Felipe snaps, moved to his native Spanish before he translates. “Don’t think you can come marching back in and get your job back, missy. You go out now, and you go out for keeps.”

I suppress a stab of sorrow. The relentless pace and energy of Breakfast Ahoy have been an antidote to the long stretches of stillness and tedium at the B&T. But I can’t escape the B&T—Mom would hear about that right away.

Jase protests, but I ignore him.

“Getting rid of that uniform? Long overdue,” I tell him. More importantly, quitting Breakfast Ahoy frees up three mornings of my week.

“I hate that this changes your life too.”

But nothing like the way things are changing for the Garretts. Mrs. Garrett practically lives at the hospital. She comes home to feed Patsy, snatch a few hours of sleep, and have long, ominous-sounding conversations on the phone with the hospital billing department. Alice, Joel, and Jase trade off spending nights with their dad. George wets his bed constantly and Patsy hates the bottle with a mighty passion. Harry starts swearing more often than Tim, and Andy spends all her time on Facebook and reading, rereading Twilight again and again.

The night air in my room is warm and close, suffocating, and I wake, gasping for cool air and water. I head downstairs toward to the kitchen, stopping when I hear Mom. “It doesn’t feel right, Clay.”

“We’ve gone over this. How many glasses of wine had you had?”

Her voice is high and shaky. “Three—four, maybe? I don’t know. Not all of them, anyway, just a few sips here and there.”

“Over the legal limit, Grace. This would end your career. Do you understand? No one knows. It’s done. Move on.”

“Clay, I—”

“Look at what’s at stake here. You can do more good to more people if you get reelected. This was a blip—a misstep. Everybody in public life has ’em. You’re luckier than most—yours wasn’t public.”

Mom’s ringtone sounds. “It’s Malcolm from the office,” she says. “I’d better take it.”

“Hold on,” Clay says. “Listen to yourself, sugar. Listen. Your first thought is for your duty. Right in the middle of a personal crisis. You really want to deprive people of that dedication? Think about it. Is that the right thing to do?”

I hear the tap of Mom’s heels moving into her office, and I start to edge back up the stairs.

“Samantha,” Clay says quietly. “I know you’re there.”

I freeze. He can’t know. The stairs are carpeted, I’m barefoot.

“You’re reflected in the hall mirror.”

“I was just…thirsty and I…”

“Heard all that,” Clay concludes.

“I didn’t…” My voice trails off.

He comes around the corner of the stairs, leaning against the stairway wall, arms folded, a casual stance, but there’s something unnaturally still about him.

“I didn’t come here by chance,” he tells me softly. He’s backlit by the kitchen light and I can’t quite make out his face. “I’d heard about your mother. Your mama…she’s good, Samantha. The party’s interested. She’s got the whole package. Looks, style, substance…she could be big. National. Easy.”

“But—” I say. “She hit him, didn’t she?” It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud. He turns slightly and now I can see him better. I want so much for surprise or confusion to cross his face. But they aren’t there, just that focused, intent look, a little grimmer now.

“An accident.”

“Does that matter? Mr. Garrett’s still hurt. Badly. And they don’t have medical insurance and they’re already broke and—”

“That’s sad,” Clay says. “Really. Good people struggle. Life’s not fair. But there are people who can change things, who are important. Your mother’s one of them. I know you’re close to those Garretts. But think about the big picture here, Samantha.”

In my head I see Mr. Garrett patiently training Jase, coming up behind Mrs. Garrett in the kitchen, dropping a kiss on her shoulder, making me feel welcome, reaching out to Tim, scooping up the sleepy George, his face in the shifting light of the fireworks, solid and capable, clicking his pen and rubbing his eyes over accounts at the store. “They are the big picture.”

“When you’re seventeen with your hormones in a riot, maybe.” He laughs softly. “I know that seems like the whole world now.”

“It’s not about that,” I argue. “Mom did something wrong. You know it. I know it. Something that hurt someone seriously. And—”

Clay sits down on the steps, tilts his head back against the wall, tolerant, almost amused. “Shouldn’t your first concern be for your own mother? You know how hard she works at this job. How much it means to her. Could you really live with yourself if you took that away?”

His voice gets softer. “You and me and your mama. We’re the only three people in the whole world who know about this. You start talking, you tell that family and everyone will know. It’ll be in the papers, on the news—might even go national. You wouldn’t be the privileged princess in her perfect world anymore. You’d be the daughter of a criminal. How would that feel?”

Bile burns the back of my throat. “I’m not a princess,” I say.