"I know," he said. "I'm not asking you to love them. I'm asking you to set the table." He stopped in the kitchen doorway. "And I'm asking you to stop telling my daughter that she's going to get her house back. She has her house. It's got more people in it. That's all."
He let himself out. In the window as he backed down the driveway he could see her still sitting at the kitchen table under the sunflower clock, and behind her the refrigerator with its photographs, Bryony and Bryony and Bryony, and she had not moved.
The cashier's check went out on Friday. Leti mailed it herself from the post office on Woodlawn, in an envelope with no note, and came home and said only, "It's done," and went upstairs to change out of her scrubs.
On Saturday morning she knocked on Bryony's door. Barrett was in the hall with a laundry basket and he did not mean to listen and did. He heard Leti say that she owed Bryony something and that it wasn't money, not really, but it was going to look like money, and he heard Bryony say, "What?" in the guarded voice, and then the rustle of an envelope. Three hundred and fifty dollars, the Orlando deposit, out of the paycheck Leti had cashed on Thursday. He heard Leti say, "I should have done this in September. I didn't, and the reason I didn't wasn't about you, and you got it anyway. I'm sorry." There was a long silence. Then Bryony said, "Okay," and then, after another while, "Thank you, Leti," and the word mija was not said, and nobody flinched.
The markers went back to Amparo that afternoon, all twenty-four of them. Amparo said she didn't want them back, she'd given them, and Bryony said that wasn't how giving worked if the person was only doing it because they were scared, and Amparo thought about this and said, "Then we can share them," and Bryony said, "Fine, but you have to put the caps on," and that was the treaty. Barrett found them that evening at the kitchen table, the case open between them, Bryony drawing eighth notes with faces and Amparo coloring the faces in, badly, outside the lines. The socks with the cats on them were not discussed. Bryony wore them anyway.
He went into the school portal that night and changed the emergency contacts. He had never looked at them closely. For Bryony he was first and Winifred was second. For Itzel and Amparo it was Leti and then Araceli in Liberal, three hours away. He put