Chapter 11: Three A.M.

At three in the morning I found Anson on the gray couch with every light off.

He wasn't asleep.

He sat with his elbows on his knees, looking at the black glass and the city lights beyond it.

"I need to say something," I said.

"So do I."

"Me first. I've been holding it for a week."

He nodded once.

I stood in front of him in the T-shirt I'd borrowed from my suitcase and said it to his face.

"The night I came home, you said you'd marry me and not love me."

"Then my mother threw a check at my head. Forty people laughed."

"And you stood in the middle of that room and said nothing, Anson."

"You didn't say one word for me. Not one."

"I was a stranger in a house full of strangers, and the one man who was supposed to be on my side looked at the floor."

He lifted his head.

His eyes were red.

"That," he said, "is the thing I have regretted most in six years of regretting things."

"Then why did you do it?"

"Sit down, Abby."

I sat at the other end of the couch, as far from him as the cushions allowed.

"Your father called me the morning they found you," he said. "He gave me a script."

"Be cold, he said. Be a little cruel. Make her feel there's only one kind person in the house."

"He wanted me to be the bad one, so he could be the good one."

"So I'd run to him."

"Yes."

"And you did it."

"I did the first half," Anson said. "I said it. Don't expect me to love you."

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