"Okay."
"I'm not angry that you helped her. I want you to hear that, because I think you think that's the part. It isn't. If you'd come to me that night in August and said, Shelby's in trouble and I want to use the porch fund to get her into a program, I would have said yes. I would have said yes before you finished the sentence. I'd have driven up with you. You know that."
He was quiet. Then: "I know that."
"So it's not the money. It's that you decided I wasn't allowed to say yes. You decided for me. You took half of four years of my life out of an account with both our names on it, and you bought a phone so I couldn't see, and you made a fake certificate and let me put it on the fridge with the pineapple magnet. Every morning for eight weeks I poured my coffee and looked at it. You let me be the fool in my own kitchen." Her voice was steady. She had been practicing it in the armchair for four hours. "And you told my sister it was your money. So she'd feel okay taking it. So she wouldn't have to know she was taking something from me. You lied to her too. You lied to both of us so you could be the only one who knew everything."
"Yes," he said.
"And in the locker room, when I found it, you didn't tell me the truth. You tried to take it."
"Yes."
"Don't just say yes."
He turned to look at her. His eyes were red-rimmed and his face had the grey stubble-shadow of a man who had not slept. "What do you want me to say? You're right. Every part of it, you're right. I told myself I was keeping a promise to her. But I picked the promise that let me be the hero. That's the truth. In meetings, they talk about how you can be sober and still be a drunk. Still be sneaky. Still make yourself the center of the story. Glenn said that to me in September, and I got mad at him, and I didn't call him for two weeks." He looked down at his hands on the rail. "I don't know how to fix it."
"You don't," Kristen said. "Not tonight. Maybe not for a long time. I don't know yet."
"Are you leaving me?"
She thought about it honestly, because he deserved an honest answer and because she did too. She thought about eleven years. About his big hand on her thigh on Route 9 last Easter. About the way he'd said, That's the only thing I know how to do with my body when I'm scared. About his open palm in the air, not grabbing, and how not-grabbing was not the same as not-threatening.
"I don't know," she said. "I'm not leaving you this morning. That's all I know. I want you to go stay with Danny for a while. I want to come home to an empty house and be angry in it without having to watch you be sorry. And I want us to see somebody. A real somebody. Not Glenn, and not your brother, and not my friend from class. Somebody whose job it is."
"Okay."