Then Dana turned on her heel and went inside. They heard her on the stairs. They heard drawers. Kenzie stood on the patio with her ruined updo and her phone in her hand and her mascara running, and she looked at the fire pit, and she looked at Junie, and for the first time in three years Junie saw something in her face that was not boredom or contempt. She didn't know what it was. Maybe fear. Maybe just a seventeen-year-old girl who had believed something her whole life and was watching it come apart.
"I didn't know," Kenzie said, to nobody. "About the money. I didn't know where it was coming from. I swear I didn't."
"Maybe not," Mark said. Not unkindly. "But you knew about the laundry room, Kenzie. You walked past it every day."
Kenzie opened her mouth, and then closed it, and then went inside after her mother.
Brooke was still standing in the slider. Mark looked at her.
"You don't have to go anywhere you don't want to go tonight," he said. "Your mom's your mom, and I'm not gonna get between you two. But if you want to come with us to Pearl's, you're welcome. And she can pick you up there tomorrow, calm, and you can talk."
Brooke looked at the stairs. Then she looked at Junie.
"Can I come?" she asked Junie, not Mark. "I want to see you in it. I said I wanted to see."
"Yeah," Junie said. Her voice came out strange. "Yeah. Get your shoes."
From upstairs Dana's voice came down, sharp and cold: "Brooke! Get your bag! We're leaving!"
Brooke went to the bottom of the stairs. She stood there with one hand on the banister. And then she said, in a voice that carried just fine, a voice Junie had never heard her use: "I'm going to Pearl's, Mom. I'll call you tomorrow."
There was a silence upstairs. Then a door slammed so hard a picture fell off the wall in the hallway.
Mark looked at his watch.
"Five-eighteen," he said. "Everybody in the truck."