Chapter 6: Family First

The argument that followed didn’t have a clean shape to it. It looped back on itself three or four times, everyone talking over everyone else, the coffee Diane had made out of habit an hour earlier going cold and untouched on the side table, until her voice finally cut through, high and pleading, the tissue in her fist reduced to something like confetti.

“Nobody is asking you to forgive Grant immediately, Evan. We just need to get through the next few weeks.”

Evan caught the word the way you catch a splinter under a thumbnail — small, sharp, impossible to ignore once you’ve noticed it’s there. Immediately. Not ever. Not at all. Just — not yet. Not on this particular timeline.

“So forgiveness is expected,” he said. “Just not on a deadline. Good to know there’s a deadline at all.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“It’s what you meant, Mom.”

“I meant that families go through hard things and find their way to the other side of them. That’s all I meant by it.”

“Is that what this is,” Evan said. “A hard thing. Something we’re all going through together, like a bad winter.”

Natalie leaned forward from the floor, hands lifted like she was trying to physically hold the room together with her palms alone. “I think everybody needs a little time before anybody says anything they can’t take back. This is — it’s a lot, all at once, and nobody in this room is thinking clearly right now, including me.”

“I’m thinking plenty clearly,” Evan said. “I want to know why Grant still gets to be vice president next week. Why he still gets his announcement and his corner office and his entire future running this company, while I’m the one being asked to go around lying to everybody I know so his life doesn’t get complicated.”