Something rose up in Lucy's chest so fast it was like being hit. She grabbed for the belt. Paige stepped back, easily, the way you step back from a dog on a leash, and Lucy's hand closed on air.
"Take it off. Paige. Take it off, it's not yours, you can't just—"
"What is going on out here?"
Dana stood in the doorway to the kitchen. She was wearing her olive-green button-down, the one she wore on Saturdays when she did the accounts at the dining room table, and black pants, and her brown hair was clipped back at the nape of her neck with a plain barrette. She was forty-four. She was pretty in a careful way, the way the house was pretty, everything chosen and placed. She had a pencil tucked behind one ear.
"She took my mom's coat," Lucy said.
Dana looked at Paige. Paige looked back, wide-eyed, mild. "My parka's disgusting. I'm just borrowing it for like two hours."
Dana's gaze moved over the green coat, down and up. Something passed across her face, very fast, a flicker like a moth crossing a lamp, and then it was gone.
"Let her borrow it," Dana said.
"It's not hers to borrow. It's not—it was my mom's, she can't—"
Dana crossed the mudroom in three steps, opened the closet, and reached inside. She came out with a jacket Lucy had never seen before, a plain beige thing, quilted, the kind of jacket that came free with a car wash. She held it out.
"Here," Dana said. "Wear this one if you're cold."
Lucy didn't take it. She couldn't make her arms move. She could feel her face going hot and crumpled and she could feel the tears coming, the stupid, useless tears, and she knew that if she cried it would be over, Dana would win, Paige would win, the coat would go out the door on Paige's back to Tanner's house, where his brothers would wrestle on the floor and somebody would spill a Mountain Dew on it.
"Stop being dramatic," Dana said, quietly, coldly, and pushed the beige jacket against Lucy's chest until she had to hold it or let it fall.
That was when the front door opened.
***
Irene Ostrowski had been standing on the step for perhaps thirty seconds, holding a cardboard box with a pie in it, and she had seen most of it through the glass.