Chapter 4
I called Desmond that night from the guest room, after Piers was finally asleep with a plate of real food — the fresh chicken from the cooler, which Marcelline hadn't dared object to me serving him — sitting warm in his stomach for what I suspected was the first time in longer than either of us wanted to think about.
It was early morning where he was. He picked up on the second ring, the way he always did, like some part of him was permanently braced for bad news from home.
"Jess. What's wrong."
I told him. All of it, in the order I'd found it — the burnt plate, the fresh cooler, the allotment statement, the intercepted letters, the email to his casualty officer that had been quietly deflected. I could hear him go silent in a way I'd only heard once before, the week our mother died, a silence that wasn't absence but the sound of a person doing everything they could not to break something with their bare hands from that far away.
"Read me the email again," he said. "The one she sent back to Sergeant Alvarez."
I read it. I heard him exhale.
"I knew something was wrong," he said. "I knew it for weeks. Every time I asked, she had an answer ready before I even finished the question. I told myself I was being paranoid. Deployment does that to you — you start seeing problems that aren't there because you can't do anything about the ones that are."
"This one was there," I said.
"I'm requesting emergency leave in the morning," he said. "I don't care what it takes. And Jess — don't let her leave that house with him. Not for a night, not for an hour. I'm calling my lawyer before I call anyone else."
"What about Lily?" I asked, because the six-year-old with the untouched fork was still sitting in my mind, the way she'd asked her mother a question and gotten silence for an answer.
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"Lily's not the problem," Desmond said quietly. "She's a kid who got fed. That's not a crime. What her mother did to get the money to feed her — that's the problem. I'm not interested in punishing a six-year-old for her mother's choices. I am interested in making sure my son never eats another burnt dinner while somebody spends his money twelve feet away."
I stayed awake most of that night, sitting on the guest room floor with the door cracked so I could hear if anyone moved down the hall. Marcelline didn't come near Piers's room. I think some part of her understood that whatever chance she'd had to manage this, to talk her way around it the way she apparently had for months, had ended the moment I pulled that envelope out from under a stack of chicken containers.
