"Lydia."
"I have to ask, Grady. I don't think you did. I have to ask anyway, because somebody's going to ask me whether I asked."
"No. I did not steal Sheryl Kinsella's underwear."
"Okay." I heard her breathe out. "Okay. What's Pippa know?"
"Everything. She was on the stairs."
"I want her to come stay with me for a while."
That landed harder than the keys. "Lyd, she's in school here—"
"I'll drive her. It's forty minutes. Grady, listen to me. I'm not taking her from you. I'm taking her out of a house where the police were this morning and the whole neighborhood is talking and somebody might say something to her at the bus stop. Just for a week or two. Until it's done."
She was right. I knew she was right. I said yes, and then I sat in my car in the school parking lot with my forehead on the steering wheel for a while, until a custodian I knew knocked on my window to ask if I was all right, and I said I was, and drove home.
Verna Haverty was waiting at the end of her driveway in her lawn chair, at three in the afternoon, which was early for her. She didn't wave me over. She didn't have to.
"I read it," she said, when I'd crossed the street. "I commented."
"Verna, please tell me you didn't."