She put forty dollars on the table, which was more than half, because she had been raised by a woman who never owed anyone anything, and it was the one lesson that had stuck. She walked out into the March night.
And in the parking lot, under a sodium light, she saw them. Dorian with his arm around his mother's shoulders. Vivian's head bent. His mouth close to her hair, saying something. Neither of them looked up.
Avery got in her car and drove home and told Paige it was the worst date of her life.
Dorian texted at eleven fourteen: *I'm so sorry. I came back and you were gone. Can I explain?*
She didn't answer. She hadn't wanted an explanation. She'd wanted never again to feel what she'd felt when Vivian Mercer asked *why bread?* and looked at her like the answer mattered — and then got up and walked away.
* * *
The toast was underway when she came back outside.
She stood at the edge of the patio, half in shadow, in a dead woman's dress, with her wet hair twisted up in one of Harlan's rubber bands. Vivian stood by the drink table with a glass raised. She'd put her shoes back on. The hem of her dress was still dark from the pool.
"—and I've known Ellis since he was five years old and refused to wear anything but a Spider-Man costume for the first four months he lived with us," Vivian was saying. Laughter. "He slept in the mask. He thought if he took it off, someone might decide he was the wrong boy and send him back."
The laughter thinned, then turned into something softer.
"So I've watched him spend a long time deciding whether it was safe to take things off. Masks. Armor. Shoes in the house, honestly, until he was twelve." More laughter. "And then he met Paige. And the first time he brought her to dinner, he walked in and took off his shoes at the door, and I went into the kitchen and cried into the green beans." She lifted her glass. "Paige, thank you for being a place he can take off his shoes. Welcome to the family. It's a lot of people who are bad at saying what they mean. You'll fit right in."
*To Paige and Ellis.* Glasses rose. Paige was crying openly now, her face pressed into Ellis's shoulder, and Ellis's eyes were wet, and Avery, at the back, found that her own throat had closed.
*Lived with us. Send him back.* She hadn't known. She had not known one single thing about any of them.
She found Dorian by the side gate, where an orange extension cord ran from the garage to the string lights. He was sitting on an overturned bucket with his elbows on his knees, looking at nothing.
He stood when he saw her. Old-fashioned. She still liked it, which annoyed her.
"That dress," he said, and stopped.
"Bev's."
"I know." He was quiet a moment. "She used to give us popsicles. Ellis and me. Over the fence, the first summer. Grape ones. She said they were the only flavor that matched our lips when we'd been in the pool too long."
Avery looked down at the yellow fabric and felt suddenly that she was wearing something too heavy to carry.
"Your brother," she said. "You were — adopted."