Chapter 4: Everybody Knows

He sat at the kitchen table for a while before he did anything else, the dish towel loosening around his hand, ice sliding free and pooling water onto the placemat Claire had picked out at a craft fair the summer before, the one with little embroidered wheat stalks along the border because she said it made the kitchen feel like it belonged to actual Midwesterners and not people just pretending. He looked at that placemat a long time. He looked at the seating chart binder next to it, and the box of thank-you cards already addressed in Claire’s handwriting for gifts that hadn’t arrived yet, and the little sample jar of local honey they’d been debating as a wedding favor, sitting there sweet and useless and already belonging to a version of his life that had stopped existing sometime around three-fifteen that afternoon.

He didn’t cry. He kept waiting for it and it kept not happening, like a sneeze that builds and then quits.

He called his parents before he did anything else, because some instinct sharper than his actual thinking told him Grant would already be working the phone lines in his head, already building the version of the story that made this survivable, and Evan wasn’t going to hand him the head start.

Robert answered on the second ring, easy, unbothered, a man expecting nothing worse than a question about Sunday dinner. “Hey, bud, everything okay?”