Chapter 8

I nodded, but he didn’t seem to believe me. “It’s true,” I insisted. “It’s real. I verified it and I’m sure.”

“There’s no way.”

“There is. I swear,” I said, and crossed my index finger over my heart, as if that validated my statement.

Daniel tilted his head and looked at the paper again. Then he flipped through the others that I’d included in the file. “Tell me again who this guy was? I know you already did, but I’m not understanding. I’m not absorbing it, I guess.”

“Gabriel Richard was a Catholic priest who came here from France when Michigan was just a territory. He ended up serving as our representative in Congress, and he built schools and helped to map out a new plan for Detroit after a huge fire in 1805. He’s one of the founders of the University of Michigan, which is why the people in Ann Arbor are so interested in this stuff.” I paused. “How did your dad get these papers?”

“I have no idea.” He looked through the list I’d made, an inventory of what I’d uncovered. “I don’t really understand.”

“Neither did I,” I answered. “I’m not an expert, of course, but it looked so old to me. I saw letters, hand-drawn maps, a lot of different things. The most important item seemed to be a little book, which I assumed was a diary. Since my French is non-existent, I had to ask Brenna for help.”

“Did you have to pay her?”

“Forty bucks,” I agreed. “But then she asked me to research her boss, because she wants to blackmail the woman. So I got the money back.”

“You took money to help to blackmail someone?”

“No, I’m not helping Brenna do that! I said there was no way and to return my forty dollars before I told on her to Nicola. She handed it right over.” It was kind of amazing, actually, how much sway our oldest sister still had over us, including Brenna who liked to pretend that she didn’t care about anybody very much at all.

He continued to stare at the collection of documents that I’d handed to him. “And she translated all this?”

“Some of it,” I amended. “It’s hard to read because it’s faded and Father Richard had that old-fashioned handwriting. The French is old, too, so it’s like reading Shakespeare in another language. It’s not quite back to that time period, but you get the idea.”

“I’m starting to. The idea is that my dad had stash of historical documents from a guy who was important to the city and to the state.”

I nodded. “When I opened the box and found them, I sneezed a million times because of all the dust and when I looked more closely, I started to think that they might be kind of ancient. I brought a few of the letters to one of my dad’s old friends who owns an antique store. Esme and I went together and I think she had a good time. She seemed to enjoy the chandeliers and it made me realize that we need to get a mobile to put over her crib.”

Daniel smiled at that, but he still seemed somewhat stunned. “And this was all in a box of the stuff I gathered together at my dad’s house,” he stated, and looked at me for confirmation.

“Yes. The rest was junk. I mean, there was even some used wrapping paper in there—anyway, these documents were separated in a metal container with a rubber band around it. You must have picked it up along with the other ephemera, because that’s the label you wrote on the outside of the cardboard.”

“I kind of remember looking inside a metal box and seeing papers, but there was so much shit. I was doing my best to sort it as fast as I could because I wanted to get out of that house.”

“There was a lot,” I agreed. “It took me forever to look through just the one box that I had taken home. I meant to get to it sooner but I’ve been a little…anyway, first I researched all the things that we took pictures of in your garage. I found out that none of it is very old or has much worth.”

“Not surprising.”

“But then I found these documents,” I continued. “Yesterday, I talked to someone at U of M and she wants to see them for herself, so I thought maybe we could drive over together.” But then I hesitated. “I know that the last time we talked, the situation was a little uncomfortable, so if you didn’t want me to go, I would understand.”

He tilted his head as he looked at me. “Are you talking about the time we saw each other when you were napping outside? That was when you insinuated to my girlfriend that you had leaves stuck to your clothes because you and I had sex on your lawn.”

“Yes, that’s the occasion that I’m referring to. But I didn’t come out and lie about us having sex,” I told him. “I made a remark referencing how someone could have leaves on her pants, which was only hypothetical and didn’t have to mean anything about you. I also want to note that she was the one who started up the problem. I was prepared to be nice.” Kind of.

“You got her worked up,” he commented, “by tricking her into insulting me and into admitting that her family isn’t as great as she was pretending.”

I shrugged. “She’s like Brenna, because she doesn’t like it when people cross her. But she’s also like Juliet, because it’s easy to get her goat.” I was glad that those were the only similarities I now saw between Carrington and my sisters, because even Brenna had a good side. Well, they were also all young and pretty, but I meant in terms of character.

Then I sighed, because character was important, after all. You were supposed to show the strength of yours by being a bigger person. “Yes, I did purposefully trick her into shooting off her mouth,” I stated. “Yes, I also vaguely suggested that we were having sex, but I wasn’t thinking much when I said that. I was angry. And I’m sorry now, because I’m older and I should have been wiser and just ignored her. I might have gotten upset myself if I thought that my boyfriend was hanging out with another woman behind my back. She doesn’t know how close we used to be.”

“No, it’s hard for her to understand.”

That was because it was a confusing thing for everyone. “I’m sorry if it made you guys fight,” I told him.

“It did.” He was re-reading the inventory I’d made of Father Richard’s papers. “There’s a letter from the seventeen-nineties? It’s so damn old.”

“That’s the year he arrived in Detroit. What did you fight about?” I asked. “I mean you and Carrington, not you and the priest.”

“I understood.” He nodded. “Our argument wasn’t about you, so you don’t need to worry.”

“Oh, good,” I said, but I was aware of a feeling of disappointment that I didn’t feature in their problems—and that was not being the bigger person. This was the moment that I should have stopped prying into his life, too.

The fact that I wanted to continue prying definitely showed part of my character, one that probably wasn’t great. I knew that, but I couldn’t help myself. “Did you guys work things out?” I asked. “Is everything ok now?”

“You really don’t need to worry about it. Goddamn, I wish I spoke French, too.” He squinted at a copy I’d made of one of the documents. Per the instructions from the antique dealer, I’d put the originals in special folders and wasn’t carrying them around or touching them anymore. “Is this about a school?” he asked. “It says école a lot. I think I know that word, at least.”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “There’s a lot about schools because he was into education and whatnot. How did you and Carrington work things out? Did you talk through the argument and make up?”

“No, we didn’t,” he answered. He held the copy up to the light and squinted at it. “This is amazing.”

“It’s great. I guess you won’t be getting married anytime soon, if you’re still fighting,” I mentioned.

“We won’t be getting married at all. We broke up.”

“What?”I stared.“Really?”

He put down the papers. “I can’t believe this. My dad really did save something important.”

I had to leave the Carrington discussion for a moment. “Important, yes, but it’s hard to determine the monetary value of all these papers. Like, it’s an amazing collection, and in terms of Michigan history and the history of Detroit, it’s very significant. But the antiques dealer guy wasn’t sure what people would pay for it. His estimate was hugely broad.”

“I don’t want any money, anyway. I always thought that if there was something worth selling in all that junk then I’d donate any profit. Since you said that Father Richard was interested in schools…” He squinted again at the old letter. “ école . If I sold this stuff, I would want the money to go toward education. But I would also want his papers to be studied and used. I wouldn’t want them to be locked away in someone’s collection and out of public view.”

“That’s very generous of you. Anyway, about Carrington—”

“Ok, Sophie,” he said, and smiled. “I know you won’t give up until I tell you more of the story.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I want. But I don’t have much time to talk right now, because I need to get back Esme,” I told him. I’d only returned home briefly, in order to collect some more clothes. My mom had thrown out almost everything that I’d worn at her house as soon as I’d taken it off my body, everything except the items that I’d recently purchased. I was wearing one of my new shirts right now, in fact, and had put it on before I came over to talk to Daniel.

But Mom told me that I needed more new stuff and was also insisting that I had to go shopping with Juliet, and I’d agreed. It wouldn’t have been so bad to keep supplementing my wardrobe, and now I wasn’t as worried about money. Addie and I had talked a lot and she, Nicola, and I were splitting more baby costs together. We were doing it for Esme, not Patrick and not my mom. Everything was about taking care of that baby and we weren’t worrying about punishing anyone for mistakes…as much as they might have deserved that.

In the meantime, before JuJu and I went out together, I’d been wearing a lot of my brother’s stuff. He wasn’t around to complain that I couldn’t; he’d been sleeping more and more nights away from my parents’ house and when questioned, he didn’t have a lot to say about why or where he was spending his time. It sucked that he was away from his daughter, but it did leave his closet open to interested parties. His clothes didn’t fit me very well, but I appreciated that they did have fewer holes and other age-related issues.

His underwear was something I couldn’t bring myself to don, however, so I’d had to restock. More importantly, I’d also wanted to share the news about the documents with Daniel, so when I’d seen his truck pull up, I’d changed into my nice shirt and hurried over. Now I needed to leave again, but I wanted to keep talking to him. “I guess I could call you?” I suggested.

“Or I could go with you to your parents’ house,” he answered. “I want to meet Esme, anyway. I’ve heard that she’s the cutest baby in the world.”

“That’s true,” I agreed, but felt some reluctance. “My mom is going to be there.”

“That’s ok. I wouldn’t mind seeing her again. She was always very nice to me.”

He said that now, I thought, as I checked my rearview mirror and saw his truck following behind my car. He said that he didn’t mind seeing her, but he was unaware of my mother’s interest in him.

“Does Danny need any help with purifying his house? Your neighborhood is older and there’s a lot of energy in this city. I haven’t done a whole-house cleansing in a while, but I’d be glad to help,” she’d told me just this morning, and then frowned at my pose. “Lean into your breath, Sophie.”

I was huffing and puffing and I had no idea how to “lean into” it. Who could have guessed that yoga was so darn difficult? “He already painted most of the interior and I don’t think he needs help with purifying beyond that. And he goes by ‘Daniel,’ not—Mom! There’s no way my knee is supposed to bend that way.”

But it had, with her coaxing it, and as we’d continued to move through the poses, she’d had more questions about him. I realized that behavior had started gradually, some time before, with mentions of his name or brief inquiries about what he was doing. It hadn’t seemed like anything and I hadn’t really noticed, but it had all added up to a lot of curiosity on her part. Now that I’d seen the way things were going, I would do my best to head her off—but my mom wasn’t likely to be diverted. Me bringing him over to her house now would add a lot of fuel to the fire of her interest.

Daniel parked behind me but I worried that his truck was large enough that my father’s small SUV wouldn’t fit past it in the driveway. Not that it mattered too much, since my dad was rarely home, even less than he had been when I was a kid. I knew that he was upset about the baby but it was getting slightly irksome. No, it was actually annoying me a lot, because we needed him. There should have been another voice of reason (or at least someone not acting totally nutty) in the house besides me.

But now I had Daniel, too. He seemed unfazed when my mom ran out onto the lawn carrying a naked Esme. “She pooped everywhere. Everywhere!” she announced to the neighborhood. “I don’t know how, but it got on my special yoga blanket that can only be dry cleaned.”

“Mom, you can’t bring her outside like this.” I took the baby and put her against my chest and under my coat, hoping that all the poop was out of her and nothing else would be forthcoming onto me.

“I was feeling overwhelmed and then I got so relieved when I saw you there,” she admitted, but then turned to see my companion. Her mouth fell open. “Danny? Danny Ryder?”

“He goes by Daniel now,” I put in, but he was already stepping forward to shake her hand. I hope she’d washed them after Esme’s problem.

“Hello, Mrs. Curran.”

“Call me Jackie,” she told him. “Danny Ryder! Just look at you!” She sure did her share of looking, up and down and then back again. “You’ve certainly grown!”

“It’s Daniel, and you haven’t seen him in eleven years,” I noted. “People change.” I’d spoken over my shoulder as I headed into the house with the baby, but then I heard her start asking about his job, his house, his truck, his girlfriend…and I slowed down. Besides being a yoga master, my mother was also a master of getting information out of people—just like she’d been slowly squeezing it out of me. But I had questions, too, and I was interested in his answers.

Unfortunately, I had to go upstairs, and by the time I’d put a diaper and some warm clothes on the baby, they were drinking tea and discussing something totally off-topic and non-interesting: Juliet’s career. “If she’s unhappy, she should change it up,” Daniel was saying as I walked in.

Probably the issue was that Juliet didn’t understand that she couldn’t be the queen of the office. She was used to being the best, tallest, strongest, and fastest. It was hard to lose.

“That’s exactly what I say.” My mom smiled. “I always give the kids so much good advice, but they rarely listen. It’s like what I told you about Sophie,” she continued, her eyes briefly sliding to me. “Yes, she had a bad experience with love, but she needs to get back out there and try it—”

“Mom! Stop,” I hissed.

She was undeterred. “She came home from that trip and told me all about that man who had broken her heart—”

“I didn’t tell you anything,” I interrupted. “Nothing! I never tell you stuff because I know that you can’t keep your own mouth shut. Juliet was the one who blabbed to you because she feels an inexplicable need to try to be your friend.”

“We’re all friends,” Mom reminded me, and I walked out of the kitchen. It wasn’t right to fight like that in front of the baby, and I wouldn’t do it. I heard Daniel push back his chair and follow me up the stairs. He stopped before entering the nursery, studio, or my brother’s room, whichever you wanted to call it.

“I take it that you’re not all friends,” he commented from the doorway.

“Nope.” I couldn’t look at him. Why had she told him that terrible, embarrassing story about me and my love life? After all these years, why couldn’t everyone just forget it and leave me alone?

He came into the room, carefully moving around a pile of Patrick’s clothes. He stepped over my mom’s bolster pillow, avoided the blocks and straps, and used his hip to nudge a space so he could fit past the changing table. “It’s crowded in here,” he remarked.

“It’s because Patrick insisted on getting a queen-sized bed when he got home. Now there’s not enough floor space for us to do yoga.”

“You’ve been doing yoga?” He also moved aside the repulsive diaper trash can with his foot. “You mean, you and your mom?”

“Yes. I like it,” I admitted. Even talking about it made me thirsty, since it was a lot sweatier and more difficult than I imagined. I took a large sip from my water bottle.

“Then you and your mother have been getting along better than it seemed just now,” he pointed out.

“We’re actually doing ok,” I admitted further. “We still fight, mostly about how she’s bowing down to Patrick and refusing to make him uphold his responsibilities. We also disagree over the extent that she’s shirking herself.”

“Things aren’t perfect. Damn, I think she is, though.” He bent closer to the baby and smiled. “Wow. She’s like a little crumb of a human.”

“I know.” I smiled at her. “You can see why she needs me, since my mom had her naked outside.”

“That was weird. I wonder what she would have done if you hadn’t shown up.” He smiled at Esme. “Hi.”

I thought about his remark. “Mom tends to act helpless and confused, but I bet she would have managed to find a diaper and some clothes. She’s not a dumb person, not by any means.” Except how she’d related the story of Caspian—that was very dumb, and also very maddening. “Do you want to hold the baby?”

“I do, but I think I should sit down.” He maneuvered over to the gliding chair that some of my mom’s friends had bought as a baby shower gift, and held out his arms.

But first, I used one hand to place a blanket over his shirt. I’d gotten much more adept at doing things with only half of my body while using the other half for baby activities. “I’m covering you, just in case,” I explained to him.

“In case of what?”

“A lot of liquids come out of Esme, way more than you’d ever expect. Here.” I lifted her away from my shoulder and carefully placed her in his arms.

Daniel looked down. “Holy shit. No, I shouldn’t swear. What did you used to say instead of cursing? Blessed Virgin?”

“Holy Mary,” I corrected. “It was because my grandmother didn’t like swearing, so Nicola would never allow it.”

“Holy Mary,” he repeated. “She doesn’t even weigh as much as a drill!” He stared down at her and she stared back at him. “She’s not crying.”

“She likes the movement of the chair. And she may like you, too,” I said. She probably did, because maybe babies were like dogs. They could just sense when someone was good or bad, and Daniel (obviously) was great.

“Wow,” he said, and we spent the next several minutes talking about Esme, what she liked to eat, what milestones were in her future, why she was presently nocturnal and how that sucked.

It was stupid, though, to avoid the topic that my mother had introduced over a cozy cup of tea: my heartbreak and desertion. So after a while, I brought it up again. “Did she tell you everything?” I asked, and he knew what I was referring to.

“Probably not everything,” he answered. “She only said that you’d gone to the Caribbean to chase after some dream guy that you were going to marry, and then he dumped you and you act like you’ve been scarred for life.”

“I guess she said enough!”

“Yeah, I got the picture,” he answered. “She also told me something about coconuts.”

“No, he didn’t get hit with one. Getting hit in the head with a coconut would have been a bridge too far,” I mused.

“What does that mean?”

“It means, my mom doesn’t know the real story,” I answered quickly. “She only knows Juliet’s interpretation of it, and Juliet is wrong. I’m not heartbroken and I’m not devastated, not anymore. If I ever really was,” I added. “Actually, no one ever had that power over me.”

“Good,” Daniel said. “It sounded like it happened a long time ago, and I’m glad you’re over it.”

“I’m totally over it and I really don’t like discussing it,” I responded. “You came here to meet the baby and to tell me about your own break up. Why did you dump Carrington?”

“Sophie, we’re not fifteen years old. Nobody ‘dumped’ anybody,” he said. “We talked about a lot of things and mutually decided what we were going to do.”

“What were the things that you talked about?”

He studied me for a moment. “I’m deciding how much is actually your business,” he explained.

“It might make you feel better to talk about it,” I suggested, which was something that Addie often said to me.

It made Daniel laugh quietly, which made Esme quiver, too. She seemed to watch him and I held my breath. “Oh,” I sighed after a moment. “I thought she was going to smile. That should happen soon.”

“I’ll have to come back to see it,” he said, and he smiled at both of us. “Are you going to keep asking about Carrington?”

I shrugged. “I’ll try to stop, but I probably can’t.”

He thought for another moment. “It’s not a secret but I don’t want to invade her privacy, so I’ll only tell you my side.” I waited, and then it became clear that Esme needed another diaper. As I changed her, he talked again. “She was ashamed of me.”

“What?” There was so much bite in my tone that the baby looked shocked. I kissed her forehead and told her it was ok. “Why would that woman have been ashamed of you?” I asked, my voice much more pleasant. I refastened all the tiny snaps and returned her to my shoulder, and I swayed my hips in a side-to-side motion that now felt very natural.

“She knew a little about how I grew up,” he said. “I don’t have a family like hers.”

“Her mother’s boyfriend is age-inappropriate and her brother acts like a frat boy douche. If she’s proud of that…” I put my hand over my mouth and muttered, “Sorry,” from between my fingers. “I’ll stay quiet.” I resumed swaying and rubbing the baby’s back.

“I didn’t go to college, I’m not a CEO with a vanity plate on my truck, I’m not important like her father,” he continued after a moment. “None of those things are likely to happen, either, because I don’t want them.”

I had to speak again. “That’s all true, but wasn’t it clear to her before now?”

“Sure. I didn’t hide anything about myself.”

“Then why did she want to marry you so much?” I demanded.

“Who said she did? We talked about the future, but nothing was settled.”

“What…you told me….” I tried to think about what he’d said regarding that topic. He’d definitely mentioned that she was at the age to think about commitment and so was he…actually, I didn’t remember him making any statements more definite than that.

“Maybe I told you that we’d talked about it, but that was as far as it went. I was trying to be better about that stuff, better than how I acted with Lisanne,” Daniel explained.

“Ok,” I said, shaking my head. “But if she felt like you weren’t good enough for her, why did it take so many months to break up with you?”

“She didn’t. She didn’t break up with me,” he answered.

“You said it was ‘mutual.’ Isn’t that code for ‘she left me?’”

“Not in this case. I’d realized that we had problems a while ago and I’d been thinking about them.” Sure, because he wasn’t someone who rashly jumped to conclusions, like how someone might have assumed that a friend was in imminent danger of marrying a terrible woman. “There were things that had bothered me for a while,” he went on. “I was never around her family, never around her friends. She would make excuses about why she didn’t want to introduce me to them and she would also make remarks about the future, like how I’d be happier when I owned my own business, or what I would major in when I went back to school. I felt like she meant that I needed to make myself better and she was hiding me until I did. So I asked her if that was true and she said no, but that I really needed to make some changes and that afterwards, I would be glad that I’d worked on myself.”

My anger mounted again. “ You would be glad or she would? It sounds like her problem, not yours.”

“She admitted that she wanted me to be more career-driven and more educated. I told her that wasn’t going to happen. First of all, I like my current job. Also, I was an idiot in school—”

“That is bull!” Mindful of Esme, I had whisper-yelled. “You were not an idiot in school, not at all! You could have gone to college if you had wanted to, but you didn’t enjoy it. And now you’re successful in other ways so you don’t need to prove anything to anybody.”

“You said just about the same thing to my precalculus teacher. I don’t remember what you were defending me over, but you tore into that guy…” He laughed again as Esme watched him.

“Are you upset about Carrington?”

He thought. “No, not really, and that must mean something. Right?” He held out his arms. “Can I hold the baby again?”

“Yes. Even though she doesn’t weigh as much as a drill and even though I’m already stronger from doing yoga, she does get heavy.” I carefully passed her back. “I’m getting more interested in fitness,” I casually added.

“Good for you,” he said. He was smiling at the baby, and it really didn’t seem like he was upset about his breakup. Good for him, I thought.

“There is a lot of yoga stuff in this room,” he commented. “There’s a lot of mess.”

“I know. We’re going to shift the studio into Grace’s room. She was being a pill and arguing, saying that her space has been invaded since I’ve been sleeping with her, but I’m the one suffering from that because she kicks like a mule. Anyway, she can see that this is too much. She’s also saying that she’s moving out, which would make Grace’s room the baby’s room.”

“What about Patrick?” Daniel asked.

“What about me?”

I jumped when I heard my brother’s voice. In all the time I’d spent here with his baby, I hadn’t seen him very much except when I’d dragged him (literally) into helping out at night. He left during the day and as much as I wanted to physically restrain him, it just wasn’t feasible. Yoga hadn’t made me strong enough (yet). Of course, I’d sent him strings of angry messages and yelled at him on the phone, but he’d been letting my calls go to voicemail. That was now full, so I felt fortunate that I could now yell right to his face.

I drew in a deep breath and opened my mouth.

“Patrick, do you remember me?” Daniel stood with Esme in his arms and carefully stepped around the junk over to where my brother stood. “Sophie and I were friends in high school.”

My brother squinted at him. “Danny.”

“I go by Daniel, now. You let me ride your bike and taught me how to shift the gears.”

I remembered that, too. He had never owned a bicycle and Patrick, looking up to the older guy, had been thrilled to show him how to ride it.

“Yeah, man. It’s good to see you again.” My brother smiled, one of the few times I’d seen him with that expression since he’d arrived in Detroit. It faded, though, when he looked down at the bundle in Daniel’s arms. “Hi,” he said uneasily to his daughter.

“Here,” Daniel offered. “You can take her. I was only borrowing her.” I watched, a little anxiously, as they completed a handover. “I never held a kid that small.”

“Me neither,” Patrick stated. He looked down at his little girl and his face now tightened with anxiety. He didn’t move to kiss her or even speak to her again.

“She’s beautiful,” Daniel told him. He put his own hand under the baby’s back so they were both holding her, and I relaxed. He would never, ever let anything happen to Esme. My brother wouldn’t have hurt her on purpose, either…but he was a little thoughtless. More than a little.

The two of them kept talking, even laughing, up until the time that my mom tentatively called that dinner was ready. Patrick looked at me and held out his daughter. “Does she need a diaper or something? Do you want to take her?”

“I’ll carry her,” I agreed, happy to have her back. I followed my brother down the stairs and Daniel came behind me.

My mom had set the table for four. “Grace won’t be joining us tonight,” she said, which was usually the case. I wasn’t sure what my youngest sister was up to, but it was something that kept her away from home a lot—even more reason for her to give up her room. “No, Daniel, that’s your spot,” she told him as he started for the door. She was pointing to my father’s chair at the head of the table. Dad wouldn’t be joining us either, I surmised, but that was usual, too. I’d hardly laid eyes on him in weeks.

I fed the baby and then my mom held her for a while so that I could eat, and the dinner was odd but ok. Odd, because it had just been the three of us (Esme, me, and my mother) for a while, and ok because Daniel made things easier. He talked to Patrick about California, mentioning that he’d taken a vacation in Napa and thought it was beautiful. They also talked about moving home.

“It was funny coming back here,” Daniel mentioned. “I’ve changed a lot and Detroit has, too.”

“For me, everything is exactly the same,” my brother said. He sounded angry about that.

“Adjustment is always a process,” my mother soothed, but he ignored her and announced that he hated being here.

“It might be better if you were working,” I had to put in, and my relatives at the table (besides my niece) glared at me. “I’m just saying, it would feel better if you were in a routine and not messing around with your old friends all the time, the ones who were losers back in high school, too. Liv always wanted you to stay away from them.”

It was a bad idea to mention his former fiancée, the one he’d cheated on and who was now very happily married to someone else. Patrick immediately flared into anger. “Shut up, Sophie,” he told me. “I’m not taking advice from you.”

“Why? Because you’re doing so well on your own?” I retorted. “You were rejected by Liv, you got fired from your job in San Francisco, you got a random woman pregnant, you’re living at home with your parents, and you spend your time partying with idiots. Yeah, I could see why you think you’re sailing through life.”

“At least I’m aware of my problems,” he told me.

“What does that mean?”

He laughed, but it sounded bitter. “You don’t notice our sisters trying to fix you? There’s a reason, and it’s that your life is a joke.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my life! I’m perfectly happy!” I informed him. I was happy a lot of the time, or at least at certain moments.

“At least I really lived a little, at least I had someone who loved me,” he answered.

Now my mom sighed out the name of his former fiancée: “Liv.”

“You’ll never have that,” Patrick continued. “You’ll never have anyone love you because you act like a freaking witch. And at least people want to have sex with me, but no man would touch you—”

“That’s enough,” Daniel told him. “Remember that she’s the one taking care of your kid. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you and don’t ever be a dick to Sophie.”

My brother shoved back in his seat and left the room, and my mother fixed me with a glare, handed over the baby, and followed him. I put Esme against my shoulder and patted her back as she made her noises. I was shaking with anger and I didn’t want to look at the man at the head of the table, the one who’d just listened to my brother say that no one would ever either love me or screw me.

“I do remember you guys fighting,” Daniel remarked, “but it wasn’t quite so bitter.”

I looked down at the baby instead of back at him. “When you and I were friends, my siblings and I argued over the car and how Juliet was always using up all the hot water. Now we’re dealing with real problems and it sucks.”

“What he just said isn’t true.”

“I don’t care about Patrick’s opinions. I don’t care what anyone says or thinks, not ever.” I pressed my cheek against Esme’s fluffy hair.

“What you just said isn’t true, either. We didn’t used to be friends.”

Now I looked at him. “What?”

Daniel stood and moved to the chair next to me. He put his hand on the baby’s back, over mine. “It’s not something in the past. We still are friends.”

I nodded. “I’m glad about that,” I said. I was so glad that I almost started crying, because it was so lucky to have another chance.