"Why is your friend sad? " Nathan crouched down to her level. What makes you think she's sad, Bug? She has sad eyes, Lily said simply. Even when she laughs. My teacher has happy eyes.
Mrs. Alvarez has happy eyes. Your friend has sad eyes. She's pretty, but she's sad. Lily considered her cat.
Is somebody mean to her? Nathan looked at his daughter for a long moment. 7 years old and she saw it in one morning. The thing 400 employees and a board of directors and a whole city of people who feared her had never once bothered to see. "Yeah, Bug," he said quietly.
"I think somebody's been mean to her. " "That's not nice. " "No," Nathan said. "It's not. You should tell them to stop. " Nathan almost laughed, except it wasn't funny. "It's not that simple, sweetheart. When you're a grown-up, sometimes the person being mean is hard to get away from.
Lily frowned, working through this with the terrible clarity of a child. But she can just leave. If somebody's mean, you leave. That's the rule. You told me that.
You said if a kid at school is mean, I don't have to stay and play with them. I did say that. So why doesn't she leave? Nathan didn't have an answer that a seven-year-old could hold, so he just kissed the top of her head and said, "Eat your eggs before they get cold. " Down the hall, the voice had changed. It had gone quiet.
Not the quiet of the call being over, but the quiet of someone being talked over. Nathan knew that quiet. He'd lived in that quiet for years of his marriage. It was the sound of a person going small. He set his jaw and made himself stay by the stove.
Behind the bathroom door, Victoria stood with her back against the cold tile, and the phone pressed to her ear, and Adrienne's voice poured through it like warm honey with a razor in it. And I've been worried sick, Vic. Sick. I called the apartment three times. Gerald said, "You never came home.
Do you have any idea what that does to me? I'm standing here imagining you in a ditch somewhere, and you're Where are you? Where did you even go? I stayed with a friend, Victoria said. A pause.