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“I won’t answer.”

“I’ll call again.”

I pointed at the door, and he went. I waited until it closed behind him before I gave in to the urge to sigh. What is it about bad boys that make them so, so good?

I’ve known him since kindergarten. Austin. In my elementary-school class photos, more times than not, his freckled face is beaming from the row behind me. In one, we stand beside each other, our grins showing the same missing teeth.

In high school, we had nothing in common. Austin was a jock. I was a gothpunk girl with multiple piercings and a tattoo of a dragonfly on my back. We shared college-level classes and the same lunch period. I knew who he was because of his prowess on the football field. If he knew me it was maybe because I was one of the girls every boy knew, or maybe just because we’d been in the same school since we were five. We didn’t say hi when we passed in the halls, but he was never mean to me the way some of the boys could be. Austin never called me names or made crude invitations.

In the fall of our senior year, Austin went down under a pile of boys pumped up with testosterone and fury. We won the homecoming game, but instead of riding in Chrissy Fisher’s dad’s 1966 Impala convertible, Austin took a redlights-flashing ambulance to the Hershey Medical Center.

He recovered, nothing miraculous about it. His body, bones broken and skin torn, healed. Nobody ever said he’d never play football again. Austin simply never did.

Nor basketball, either, and in the spring, not baseball. By then his chances of going to anything other than community college had vanished along with the scholarship offers, but if he ever cared he wasn’t getting a full ride to Penn State, he never said so to me.

And by then, he would have. By the time our senior year ended, Austin told me everything.

We were an odd couple, but nobody shunned us for it. I didn’t hear whispers in the halls. No jealous cheerleaders tried to pull out my dyed-black hair, and no slick rich jocks tried to convince him he was better off without me. We didn’t go to the prom, but only because we decided to stay home and watch soft porn and fuck, instead.

When I told my mom we were going to get married, she hugged me and wept. Her belly poked between us—she was pregnant with Arthur, then. If she suspected I wanted to marry Austin as much so I could move out of the house as for passion, she didn’t say anything.

When we told his parents, his dad said nothing and his mother’s eyes dropped to my waistband. She didn’t ask me if I was pregnant, and she must have been surprised as the months of our marriage passed and my belly stayed flat, but no matter how she might have felt about the prospect of me as a daughter-in-law, the idea of a bastard grandchild must’ve been worse.

I wore a thrift-store wedding dress and Austin wore a suit of his dad’s we’d paid the dry cleaner to take in. In pictures, my thick black eyeliner and my spiked black hair make me look pale, wan. Tired. Scared, even.

The truth is, I was happy.

We both were, I like to think. At least at first. Austin went to work for his dad’s construction business, and I kept up work at my mom’s shop. My granddad had died and it was hers, full-time, and now that she had Arty, she couldn’t spend as much time with it, so I managed the shop.

We were happy.

And then, we weren’t.

Chapter 07

When I was younger, the prospect of Sunday dinner at my dad’s had so excited me or stressed me out I’d vomit. Never at my father’s house—even when I was little I knew Stella wouldn’t approve of a puking kid. I didn’t puke anymore, but I’d never managed to get rid of the knots in my stomach, either.

I popped an antacid tablet now as I sat in my not-expensive-enough-to-be-impressive car in their half-circle driveway of stamped concrete. This was the fourth new house my father’d had in the past seventeen years of life with his second family. Before that he’d lived in a stately Georgian-style half mansion with his first family. He’d never lived with my mother.

Birth-order studies claim that an age difference of six or more years between siblings complicates the normal oldest, middle and youngest personality traits by also making each child an only. That’s why, though I have five half siblings and an uncle who’s more like a brother, I’m an only child. I’ve tried identifying with being the middle kid—but what it comes down to, in the end, is I’m not.

The door opened and Jeremy and Tyler ran out. They both favor my dad, too. All of us look more like siblings than we were raised to be. I was fourteen when Jeremy was born, sixteen for Tyler. They’re more like nephews or cousins than brothers. I’m not sure what they think of me, just that they’re always glad to see me and aside from the fact they’re spoiled brats who could use a good spanking now and then, I’m usually glad to see them, too.

“Hey, Paige.” Jeremy at twelve no longer ran to clutch at my legs. He settled for a half wave with limp fingers.

Tyler, ten, was nearly as tall as me but squeezed me anyway. “Paige, c’mon, we’re going to play Pictionary. Grandma and Grandpa are here already. So’s Nanny and Poppa.”

“And Gretchen and Steve, too, I see.” I pointed to the two minivans that belonged to my dad’s kids with his first wife.

“Everyone’s here,” Jeremy said somewhat sourly, and I gave him a glance. He’d always been a pretty upbeat kid. Today he scowled, blond eyebrows pinching tight over the smaller version of our father’s nose.

I leaned back into my car to grab the gift, then locked my car. It was unlikely anything would happen to it parked in my dad’s driveway, but it was habit. “Come. Let’s go in.”

I slung an arm around Tyler’s neck and listened to him babble on about school, soccer, the new game system he’d found under the Christmas tree. He had never known Santa to disappoint him. I’d stopped trying not to be envious of that, even though I no longer believed in Santa Claus.

Inside, Jeremy slunk to a chair in the corner and sat with crossed arms, the scowl still in place. Tyler abandoned me to round up pens for the game. That left me to the socially torturous task of making nice with Stella’s parents, Nanny and Poppa.

Like their daughter, they weren’t bad people. They’d never gone out of their way to be cruel. I wasn’t Cinderella. And I understood, now, what it must have been like to try to find a place in their hearts for their new son-in-law’s children, and how awkward it must have felt. A hastily wrapped Jumbo Book of Puzzles and a prewrapped box of knit mittens would always fall short in comparison to exquisitely wrapped packages in shiny foil paper with matching bows, the contents new clothes or toys. I understood. Spending Christmas at my dad’s had been last minute, haphazardly planned and rare. At least Nanny and Poppa had made an effort.

It seemed easier for them now that I was a grown-up, though it was more difficult for me. As a kid it had never occurred to me they wouldn’t like me. Now I was convinced they didn’t.

“Hello, Paige,” George, also known as Poppa, said. “How nice of you to come.”

He meant well, but the unspoken insinuation of surprise made me bite my tongue against the shout of “Of course I came! She’s my father’s wife!”

But, like Stella herself, I could never hope to impress them. I just wanted not to prove them right. So instead of shouting, I smiled.

“How are you?” I couldn’t call him George, Mr. Smith sounded absurd, and I would never call him Poppa.

I’d been asking out of politeness, but he told me exactly how he was. For fifteen minutes. And I listened, nodding and murmuring in appropriate places, as though I cared. I didn’t know half the people he mentioned, but he acted as if he thought I should. He never asked me about myself, which was fine, because then I didn’t have to answer.

Finally, the game of Pictionary got under way. Gretchen’s husband, Peter, begged off, volunteering to take care of Hunter, their three-year-old son. Steve and his vastly pregnant wife, Kelly, played, though, as did my dad and Stella, all the grandparents and Tyler. And me. Jeremy had disappeared. We split into teams, boys against girls.

“I’ll sit out,” I said when we’d counted up the teams to find the girls’ side had an extra player.

“Oh, no, Paige, are you sure?” Stella protested, but not too hard. She liked things even and square.

“Sure. Not a problem. I’ll go check on dinner, if you want.”

Okay, so maybe I’d cast myself in the Cinderella role. Just a little. But it was a relief to get into the kitchen and set out platters of vegetables and dip, cheese and crackers. Decorative breads and soft cheeses with pretty spreaders that matched the platter. Stella loved to have parties.

I found the cold-cut platters in the garage fridge and brought them into the kitchen to put them out on the table, which was serving as a buffet. I startled Jeremy when I came back in, and he whirled, can of soda in hand, from the open fridge.

From the living room, the sound of laughter wafted. I set the platter of meat on the table. Jeremy and I stared each other down.

“You’re not supposed to be drinking that before dinner,” I told him.

“I know.” His chin lifted. He hadn’t yet cracked the top.

“I’m not going to tell you on you, kiddo.” I turned to the table and took off the platter’s plastic lid so I could get rid of the fake greenery around the edges. I knew how to make things pretty.

“Don’t call me kiddo,” he said.

I expected him to slink away with his stolen prize, but he didn’t. When I turned to look at him, he was still playing with the can, shifting it from one hand to the other.

“Something up?” I moved past him to the big, mostly empty pantry, to pull out the fancy plastic plates and plastic-ware, the matching napkins.

“No.” Jeremy shrugged and disappeared up the back stairs.