Dell's father stared at her.
"You knew," he said.
"Pekka told me the day after." She folded her hands in her lap. Her voice was very even. She had decided, Dell thought, to say all of it, and to say it carefully, the way you carry something full to the brim across a room. "I didn't tell you because you didn't want anybody to know. And I didn't think it was mine to — I don't have any standing in that, Rasmus. It's her money. It's her boy. I'm the second wife. I come in after the funeral and the spaghetti supper and the quilt raffle. I didn't get to be at any of it. If I walk into that and start asking you about Freya's fund, what am I? What do I look like?"
"You look like my wife."
"Do I?" She said it without any heat at all. "You're gone four days a week. When you're home you're asleep. When you're awake you're on the phone with the yard. I married you knowing that. I'm not complaining. But I've been in this house two years with a boy who's not mine and who is very polite to me and who doesn't want me to touch him, and that is fine too, I understand that, I would be the same. But it means I don't get to fix things. I don't get to make him sorry and I don't get to make him warm. I can only do the part nobody sees."
"So you didn't buy him a coat," his father said. But it was not an accusation anymore. It was almost a question.
"I didn't buy him a coat," Gudrun said. "Partly because I had a hundred and fifty dollars every two weeks and I could put it in the fund or I could put it on a coat, and I thought, a coat is something you can see, and the fund is the thing that's actually hers. And I thought he'd rather have that back. That's what I told myself." She stopped. She looked at Dell. "And partly because I was angry. That's the truth. I'm not going to dress it up. He stood in my kitchen and lied to my face about that coat, and I gave him a chance, and he didn't take it, and I was angry, and I was tired, and I thought, fine. Fine, then. Let's see how long. And that's not a reason. That's just what happened."
She was still looking at Dell. Her reading glasses hung on their cord against her scrub top, against the little cartoon cats.