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door creak on its hinges in the aftershock of her slamming, suddenly feeling his own anger nearby, crouching, like something misshapen and ugly in his peripheral vision.
    He had looked down at the kitchen chair in front of him, a fragile thing, and gripped it to steady himself, even as the urge to lift it up over his head and hurl it against the wall rushed up from his hands, into his arms and shoulders.
    He’d done the breathing, the visualizing, employed all the strategies he hadn’t had to use in years to calm himself down. Then he’d gone out to the car, where Kara sat in the passenger seat, opened the door, and said quietly, “Why are you so mad at me all the time? The real reason.”
    Kara had stared straight ahead for a long time before looking up at him with sad, sad eyes and saying, “I lied.”
    “What?”
    “That time I said you were closed off, not passionate enough.”
    Will knew all at once what she was going to say, the general gist of it, and he braced himself.
    “You do wear your heart on your sleeve,” she told him in a hollow voice. “It’s right there. You just don’t love me as much as I love you.”
    “Kara,” Will began, then stopped.
    “You love me,” she clarified. “But only a little bit. Not enough.”
    W ILL ’ S MOTHER STOOD IN THE DOORWAY TO HIS OFFICE .
    “How’s the tea?” he asked.
    “‘It tastes like licorice,’” his mother said, smiling. “‘That’s the way with everything.’” It was a Hemingway quotation, one Will had been hearing for as long as he could remember. Even though it made no sense for his mother to love Hemingway (Woolf maybe, Austen definitely, Hemingway no), she always had. She knew that particular story, every word, by heart, and could quote whole chapters from The Sun Also Rises . When Will had finally read those stories on his own—he’d been in tenth grade—it had made his stomach hurt to think about his mother feeling so at home with all those unhappy, disappointed, disconnected characters.
    “I finished the last painting,” she said. Jokingly, she threw her arms out to the side and said, “It’s brilliant!”
    “Same as always. Thanks, Mom.”
    She leaned over and kissed the top of his head.
    “Have I told you lately how I adore you?”
    “Yep.”
    “Adore,” she said. “Not just like a lot.”
    “Adore. Got it.”
    “Good.”
    “You still need to do the book cover,” Will reminded her, “for the novel.”
    “I’ll come back,” she said.
    She turned to face the bulletin board, and Will knew she was reading the e-mail again.
    “It still says what it said the first five times, Mom.”
    “You know, it’s really too bad Cat ever left in the first place,” she said.
    “She wanted to get married,” said Will. “It seemed like a fair enough reason to go.”
    His mother turned around and said suddenly, “You know, I thought that after she left, you and Pen might fall in love.”
    Will leaned back in his chair, startled.
    “Oh, yeah? I never knew you thought that.”
    “I guess it wasn’t in the cards, though?”
    Will straightened some papers on his desk. He could feel her watching him.
    “Nope. We were friends.” He gave a half-baked smile. “Until we weren’t.”
    His mother’s cheeks reddened, and she made a gesture with one hand, as though she were brushing away the past.
    “Anyway, I think you should go.” She tapped a finger against the e-mail on the bulletin board. “Cat needs you. That’s not a small thing, is it? Even after so long?”
    “No,” admitted Will.
    “You never could say no to Cat. You and Pen. Could you?” She was smiling.
    “I don’t know. No,” said Will, with a shrug, “I guess we never could.”

C HAPTER F IVE

    A S P EN PARKED HER CAR AT THE CURB IN FRONT OF A UGUSTA ’ S father Patrick’s house, or in front of the uniformly rainforest-green ocean of lawn on which Patrick’s house floated like a distant ship, Pen thought what she had thought the very first time she had