“You don’t betray your wife with her own sister and call that an explanation.”
No one spoke after that for a few seconds. Seconds at a ruined table are longer than seconds in a kitchen or a car. They swell. They take on the ticking of the den clock. They take on the sound of a candle wick and the tiny clink of a ring against a wineglass when a hand will not stay still.
Ava stood up so abruptly that her chair barked on the floor. She did not leave. Leaving would have been mercy, and she was not ready to give anyone mercy, including herself. She stood near the table with her palms on the polished wood and felt, through the finish, the whole stupid dignity of the house. All those years of napkins and thank-you notes and good plates. All those years of believing that elegance was a form of protection.
“How long?” she asked.
Ryan shut his eyes. “Ava—”
“How long?”
Lily said, hoarse, “Don’t make him do it like this.”
Ava laughed once, a sound with no humor in it. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to make him uncomfortable.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be a thing,” Lily whispered. “It was— I don’t know what it was. It was a mistake that kept not stopping.”
“A mistake that kept not stopping,” Ava repeated. “That’s a child you’re holding.”
Lily’s hands wrapped her middle. “I know.”
Ryan stood too, but he did not come around the table. He had the instinct, at least, not to approach. “I didn’t want this to happen. I didn’t plan—”
“Do not,” Ava said, “tell me you didn’t plan. You drove her home. You had keys. You had nights I was late. You had my trust sitting on the counter like a bowl of fruit.”
He pressed a fist to his mouth. The panic in him was no longer silent. It showed in the heat along his neck, in the way his eyes flicked toward the hallway as if escape were a door and not a moral problem. “We can talk about what happens next. Privately. Not like this.”