"Yes."
"Why? If you were just getting the words off. Why say that? Why make me think—" I couldn't finish it.
Krista looked at me for a long time. And then she said the thing I've thought about more than anything else from that night, more than the letters, more than the roof.
"Because it was true," she said. "Some of it. I'm not going to stand here and tell you it wasn't, Mare. I was sick of hearing about it. I was sick of Mom coming in at nine-thirty and going straight to that thing without even taking her shoes off. I was sick of Toomey. I used to be the one she showed people. And I knew I wasn't anymore, and I knew I wasn't ever going to be again, and I'd done that to myself, I know I did that to myself. But I still hated it. I hated your picture. I'm sorry. I did. Both things." She wiped her face with the sleeve of the sweatshirt. "And I'd rather you thought I did it because I'm a jealous brat than because I flunked out of college. That's the truth. I would rather be the bad one than the stupid one. I thought if I said that, you'd hate me, and you'd tell Mom, and she'd hate me, and then everybody'd be so busy hating me they wouldn't ever ask what was on the roof."
The clock ticked. The refrigerator hummed. Out on the porch, a gust came up off the lake and the screen door rattled in its frame.
My mother got up off the floor.
It took her a while. She held onto the table. She stood with one hand on the back of a chair and the other on the little reassembled pieces of the letter on the tablecloth, and she looked at Krista, and then she looked at me, and I could see that she was about to say something and I could see that she didn't know what it was going to be. I think I'd always assumed that parents knew. That they had a drawer somewhere with the right thing in it, for when things like this happen, and they just opened it.
"I knew something," she said.
Krista went completely still.