There are two bright spots of color on his cheeks, as if he’s embarrassed to be adding anything negative to my day. My own face feels hot.
“Why?”
“It’s the film.”
“The film?”
“It’s wrong of me to get close to you. It hurts my objectivity.” He looks at the floor. “I feel terrible. But . . . right now, no one knows who was in that picture with you, but if it came out . . .”
“The Initiative might cut your funding?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. But that’s not the point. It was . . . wrong of me to take advantage of you like that.”
“I don’t think you were.”
“What I do, it makes people vulnerable. It creates a false intimacy. Kind of like therapy.”
“Teo, what are you talking about? Where’s this coming from?”
“I know it seems sudden. I know I was the one who suggested we go out.”
“Yes, you did. But that doesn’t mean you took advantage of me. If you’re not interested, you can say so.”
“I promise you that’s not it.”
“I’d almost rather it was,” I say. “It’s better than being passed over for the sake of a stupid documentary.”
He grimaces. I’ve hurt him, but it feels justified.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“We seem to have spent a lot of time apologizing to each other today.”
I pick up my wine and drain the rest of it. At this point, there’s only one day that rivals this for awfulness, and that involved Teo, too.
“I hope this doesn’t mean that you’ll—”
“Pull out of the film? Honestly, Teo?”
He looks ashamed. “I should go.”
“I—”
My front doorbell rings insistently.
“Mom?” Henry’s voice calls down the stairs. “I think the police are here.”
“What?”
I drop my glass as I stand. It bumps against the thick carpet. As I pass through the hall to the front of the house, I can see the police lights rotating blue and red through the front windows.
I open the door. Two uniformed officers are standing there, looks of concern on their faces.
“Mrs. Grayson?”
“Yes?”
“We’ve had a report that there might be an intruder in your house.”
“What? Who—?”
“On the ground. On the ground, now!”
24
A PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
KATE
The next day, the twins woke from their nap the way they always did. Singing. Kate thought she was hearing things the first time one of their voices cracked through the baby monitor. “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain” it was that time, perfectly on key with the words half pronounced. How had Andrea kept this from her? When she’d brought it up, Andrea had smiled and said she always left it as a surprise, because wasn’t it “lovely”?
It was lovely. These two little boys who could sing One Direction songs in perfect harmony. That day, it was “Story of My Life,” an apt choice if ever there was one. Kate got to their room as they were breaking into the chorus, standing up in their beds, swinging their hips.
“Sing, Aunt Kwait!”
Kate sang the rest of the song with them, but she still couldn’t get the picture of her family out of her mind. She’d barely slept after she’d seen it. Something about it was getting to her in a way she couldn’t explain. Franny was a part of it. That was for sure. The fact that she was sitting at a table with Joshua and the girls. How her hand was draped over Josh’s arm as if it belonged there . . .
Why did she suddenly care? She’d left. Left all of them behind without so much as a backward glance. That was the truth. She’d run away from them to end up looking after someone else’s children. To live on the fringes of someone else’s life.
“What next?” Steven asked. “What song next?”
“How about . . . ‘Little Things’?”
“I. Won’t. Let. These. Little. Things . . .”
Willie swung his hips. “Slip out. Of my mouth . . .”
If she was done with that life, if she’d actually moved on, then she shouldn’t care that Josh looked happy in the photo. That the camera had caught him with a soft expression on his face. An indulgent look, which Kate knew too well. She shouldn’t care that Cecily appeared ferocious, as if she were protecting one of her own children. And she shouldn’t care about Franny Maycombe. Certainly not about her, most of all.
“Kate? Where are you?”
Kate could’ve sworn that she actually saw Willie roll his eyes as Steven called, “Up here, Mommy. Having a dance party!”
Willie launched himself at Kate, landing half on her back and half on her head. And so went the next five hours. Being the boys’ personal jungle gym, while she did her best to wipe that picture from her mind.
Kate didn’t sleep that night. Instead, she watched a spider crawl across her ceiling. She counted a thousand sheep. She repeated all the reasons she’d left Chicago. She tallied up all the hurt she’d cause if she went back.
When her alarm pushed her from bed, she wasn’t any closer to an answer. She’d made one fateful decision. One. But it seemed undoable. It seemed permanent.
Later, she was sitting at the kitchen table with the iPad when Steven padded in.
“Aunt Kwait!”
“What’s up, muffin?”
He held his hands up over his head. Kate reached down and brought him onto her lap.
“You have an iPad.”
“Mommy said I could use it.”
“It’s not iPad time.”
“There are different rules for grown-ups.”
Steven cocked his head to the side. “That not fair.”
“Nope.”
“You are funny, Aunt Kwait.”
Kate put her face into his hair. How she loved that little-boy smell. These little boys.
“Those girls look sad,” Steven said.
She’d been staring at the picture again. Franny with Josh and the girls. JJ and Em. Her special names for them. She wondered if anyone called them that anymore. She’d been so fixated on the adults that she hadn’t spent as much time looking at them. Not in the way she should’ve. She could see it now. JJ wasn’t looking right at the camera. Her eyes were cast sideways. And though it was hard to tell, it seemed as if she was looking at Franny’s fingers,
