"Andre—"
"Did you put your hands on her?"
"I tapped her hand. She was grabbing. You can't let a child just grab—"
"Dad."
The voice came from the stairs. Theo stood on the bottom step in his school clothes — a light blue button-down not so different from his father's, tucked in, because Theo always tucked it in. He was eight, small for eight, and serious, with his mother's wide forehead and his father's habit of going very still when he was deciding something. He came off the step and crossed the hall and stood beside his father, close enough to touch.
He looked at Vanessa. Then he looked up at his dad, and for a moment he said nothing at all, and the silence went on so long that Andre reached down and put a hand on his shoulder.
"She does it when you're gone," Theo said.
Andre frowned down at him. "She does what?"
Theo took a breath. He did not look at the floor. He looked his father straight in the eye, the way Andre had always told him a man looks at somebody when he's telling the truth.
"She won't let her eat."
The hall went quiet. Even the refrigerator seemed to stop.
Andre looked at his son for a long moment. Then at his daughter — at the shoulders under the pink shirt, which seemed narrower than he remembered, God, were they narrower — and at the pink hair ties he had put in on Sunday night, still there, still in the same places, which meant that nobody had touched her hair in four days. His jaw set.
"I've heard enough."
"That's not what happened." Vanessa came a step into the hall. Her voice had climbed. "Andre. That is not what happened. He's eight, he's — he's angry at me, he's been angry since the day I moved in, you know that, you said so yourself—"
Andre turned his back on her.
He did it carefully, the way you turn away from a ladder you don't trust. He settled Lulu against his chest with one arm and put his free hand flat on the middle of Theo's back, and he steered them both toward the front door. He bent and hooked his duffel with two fingers without letting go of either of them.