"She said it," he said. "I was standing right there. I heard it." He looked up at me, and I saw something in his face I'd never seen there before, and it took me a second to understand that it was shame. "I thought it was just a thing you say. Like I could kill him. I didn't think anything about it. I didn't say anything to her about it. I should have."
"You couldn't have known she'd —" I nodded at Hadley.
"No," Marcus said. "But I knew your mother was sitting in a closet crying about a dress, and I knew why, and I didn't say a word to you about it, because I figured it wasn't mine to say. And I knew what she said in this kitchen and I let it go by. So I'm not going to stand up here and act like I was the only grown-up in the house today. I just happened to be the one who walked in."
Hadley started crying again then, quietly, into the glove, and Marcus reached across the table and put his hand on the back of her neck and left it there, and she didn't shake it off.
I stood in the doorway looking at my sister and her father. I thought about saying you ruined it, and I hate you, and you have no idea what that was. All of it was true and none of it was going to make anything that was cut not be cut.
"I'm going to go upstairs," I said. "I'm going to think about what to do. And then tomorrow I'm going to tell you what you're going to do about it, Hadley. Not Mom. Not your dad. Me. Okay?"
Hadley looked up at me over the glove. Her eyes were swollen almost shut.
"Okay," she said.
Marcus looked at me for a long moment, and then he nodded once, the way he nodded in the truck when I told him how many lines were left on the card.
I didn't sleep. I lay on top of the comforter on the floor, because the dress was still laid out on my bed and I couldn't make myself move it, and I listened to the house. I heard my mother come back in a little after five and go straight upstairs to their bedroom. At ten I heard Marcus's footsteps go to their bedroom door, stop, and then go back down the stairs, and the couch springs creak under him, and I understood that he was going to sleep on the couch, and I lay there on the floor and thought about the fact that in twelve years I'd never once known him to do that.
Around midnight he knocked on my door again. This time he didn't go away. I heard him sit down in the hall, his back against the wall across from my door, the floorboards complaining.