"Foster care first. Then adopted. I was seven, Ellis was five. Mom and Dad had been trying for a while. Not to have kids. To get us." He said it without drama, like a man reciting his address. "Took three years and eleven home visits. Dad died nine years ago. Heart."
"I'm sorry."
"Thank you."
The string lights buzzed overhead. Across the yard, someone had turned the playlist back up.
"I want to explain March," he said. "If you'll let me. You don't have to."
She thought of Vivian on the edge of the pool with her feet in the water. *I'll wait.* She thought of Paige on the bathroom floor. *I just wanted you to know which direction I was aiming.*
"Go ahead," she said.
He took a breath. "My mother had a date that night. At Lucca's. Her first since my dad. Someone she'd known a long time — a friend. He'd finally asked, and she'd finally said yes, and she was terrified. She'd bought a new dress. She made me look at it on three different hangers." He rubbed the scar in his eyebrow. "And I picked Lucca's for us. On purpose. Same night. Same time. So I could be across the room in case — I don't know. In case something went wrong. In case she needed me."
Avery stared at him.
"So you did bring your mother."
He held her gaze. He didn't look away, and she gave him credit for that later, lying awake.
"Yes," he said. "I brought my mother. I didn't tell you, and I spent the whole date watching her table instead of looking at you. That was wrong. You deserved somebody who was actually there."
"And her date—"
"Never showed." He looked at the gravel. "She sat forty minutes with an empty chair and a glass of wine poured for someone else. I could see her trying to look like she was waiting for a friend who was running late. Then she saw me look over, and she knew I'd seen, and I think she couldn't stand being the woman alone at the table in front of her son. So she came to ours. And she talked to you like her life depended on it, because for about half an hour it kind of did."
*What a lovely, sturdy name.*
"Her phone buzzed," Avery said. "That's when she left."
"He cancelled. Forty minutes late, by text." Dorian's jaw tightened. "She made it to the hallway by the restrooms before she started crying. I couldn't leave her there. I walked her out to her car and sat with her. I meant to come right back. By the time she could breathe, it had been twenty-five minutes, and you were gone."
"I saw you," Avery said. "In the parking lot. Your arm around her. I thought you'd gone off to review me."
He laughed once, without humor. "I wasn't thinking about you at all. I'm sorry. That's the truth. For twenty-five minutes I didn't think about you at all."
It should have hurt more than it did. Instead it felt like a splinter coming out — sharp, and then a strange relief.