at once that Chadwick wasn't even half ready to go. “Grizzly Adams, back from the wild.”
“The carnivores say hello,” Chadwick told him. “They want you to write home more often.”
“Ouch,” John said, his smile a little too brilliant. “I'll get you for that.”
Ann wouldn't make eye contact with him. She gave Norma a hug—Norma having dressed in record time, looking dangerous in a red and yellow silk dress, like a size-four nuclear explosion.
Chadwick excused himself to finish getting ready. He listened to Norma and Ann talk about the school auction, John flipping through Chadwick's music collection, shouting innocuous questions to him about Yo-Yo Ma and Brahms, Mallory setting off all the clocks on the mantel—her ritual reintroduction to the house.
When Chadwick came out again, Katherine sat cross-legged by the fireplace—his beautiful girl, all grown up, drowning in flannel grunge and uncombed hair. Mallory sat on her lap, winding the hands of an old clock, trying to get it to chime.
Chadwick locked eyes with his daughter. He felt a tug in his chest, warning him not to go.
“Don't worry, Dad,” she said. “We'll be fine.”
Those words would be burned into Chadwick's forehead. They would live there, laser-hot, for the rest of his life.
When the front door shut, Katherine felt herself deflating, the little knots in her joints coming loose.
She took Candyland down from the shelf. She joked with Mallory and smiled as they drew color cards, but inside she felt the black sadness that was always just underneath her fingernails and behind her eyes, ready to break through.
Katherine wanted a fix. She knew it would only make her depression worse—buoy her up for a little while, then make the blackness wider, the edges of the chasm harder to keep her feet on. Her therapist had warned her. Ann Zedman had warned her. Her father had warned her. They were all part of the educational team, all looking out for her best interests.
We're here to help you be successful again, Katherine.
Fuck that.
If there was anything worse than having a dad who was a teacher, it was having your dad at the same school as you. And not just for a couple of years. A K–12 school. A small K–12 school, so you had thirteen years of absolute hell, no breathing space, no room to be yourself. And if that wasn't bad enough, have your dad be best friends with the headmistress for a gajillion years—Ann Zedman always over at your house, peeking into your life.
That was why Katherine loved the East Bay. It was hers.
At least, it had been until last week—the stupid cops separating her out, scolding her, asking what the hell she was doing with those people. She remembered the ride home from the Oakland police station, her wrists raw from the handcuffs, her anger building as her father glanced in the rearview mirror, insisting that she not tell her mother what she'd been doing at the party because it would break her mother's heart. Katherine had snapped. She'd told her dad everything—to hurt him, to prove it was even worse than he thought. She did have a life of her own. Friends of her own.
Oh, Daddy.
She hated herself even more than she hated him. She'd told him. She'd ruined everything. Now he would send her away to goddamn Texas.
Mallory tugged at her sleeve. “Come on, Kaferine. You got a double red.”
Katherine looked across the game board.
Mallory had been her dress-up doll, her pretend child, her toy self she could slip into whenever real life sucked too bad. But now that Mallory had started kindergarten at Laurel Heights, Katherine felt sad every time she looked at her. She never wanted to see them ruin this little girl, the way they'd ruined her. She never wanted to see Mallory grow up.
She forced a smile, moved her double red.
Mallory drew Queen Frostine and squealed with delight.
It was an easy skip from Queen Frostine to King Kandy. Mallory won the game while Katherine was still back in the Molasses Swamp.
“What can we play now?” Mallory asked. “Horses?”
“I have a better idea.”
“No,” Mallory said immediately. “I don't like that.”
“Come on. It's our little secret.”
“It's scary.”
“Nah. For a brave kid like you?”
Katherine went to the secret panel in the wainscoting, the storage closet that her grandfather had constructed when the bottom level of the townhouse had been his shop. He was a clockmaker, her grandfather. He loved gears and springs, mechanical tricks.
The door was impossible to see from the outside. You had to press in