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it. Mal made no sound as he left the dining room. The only sound from his exit was the click of the front door as it shut behind him.
    I stared down at my plate, tears collecting at the corners of my eyes, a lump bulging in my throat. I had hardly touched my food, either, and it all looked so beautiful. So delicious. And I could not even think of eating another crumb. In the candlelight and the shocked hush, everyone was watching me. Everyone was watching me and I was so ashamed. About now. About then.
    I pushed out my chair, told Carole I would call her in the morning, told everyone it was good to see them, and left. And for the second time in less than six hours, I had to leave a room knowing that the second the door shut behind me, people would be talking about me.
    Mal marches into the house without so much as a backward glance. After slamming the door, I run up the stairs straight to the bathroom. I clatter open the bathroom window, get a cigarette and then empty my bag on the tiled floor to find my lighter. I suck the life out of a cigarette, leaning out of the window to let the evidence escape. I draw the innards out of a second cigarette in four or five inhalations, too. After I am done, after I amcalmer, I wrap the ends in a wad of toilet roll and flush the telltale signs that I am a liar. It’s only a little lie, one of action, not words, and it’s necessary because now I can talk to him without shouting.
    He isn’t in the living room, sprawled on the sofa, angrily flicking through TV stations, as I thought he might be. He isn’t in the dining room, rummaging through our CD collection, looking for something loud and thrashy he can play at full volume to rile the neighbors and hurt my ears. He is in the dark kitchen, standing in front of the open fridge door so he is illuminated by its light, chugging down a beer as though it is water.
    “I can’t believe you did that,” I say to Mal.
    The last of the pale gold liquid slides out of the clear glass bottle and down my husband’s throat. He slams the bottle back onto the shelf in the fridge, hard enough to crack the bottle or the shelf, and reaches for the next beer, twists off the top, flicks the top back into the fridge, puts the glass lip of the bottle to his mouth, starts to gulp. It’s him ignoring me. In the car, I thought I had been ignoring him right back, but now it is obvious that it’s definitely this way around.
    “Don’t you dare ignore me, Mal Wacken. I’m not the one in the wrong here.”
    He halts as he tips the bottle to his lips, lowers it and turns to me for the first time. His hooded eyes settle on me but are focused somewhere inside my head, as though he is trying to ransack my mind for information on what makes me tick.
    “I did nothing wrong,” he states. “I simply told the truth.”
    “We agreed—”
    “We agreed I wouldn’t have any contact,” Mal cuts in. “That’s all we agreed. We didn’t say I wasn’t to talk about them. Him.”
    He is right, of course. Just because we don’t talk about it,about her, about him, about them, I have assumed that he wouldn’t talk about it at all. To anyone. Not to his mother (who he must have been getting all that information from), to his friends, to his work colleagues, to our friends. The world might know all about Mal’s son and I would be none the wiser. “But you didn’t have to do that,” I insist.
    “Don’t you ever feel guilty, Steph?” he asks suddenly, the tone of his voice dropping to a low level that makes his words reverberate through me, like a low bass on a speaker moving sound through a body. “Don’t you walk around with a huge anvil of guilt sitting just there?” He presses his beer to the area over his heart. A million times he has silently and vocally asked me that, and every time the same thought flies through my mind: you have no idea how it feels to be me. To feel so guilty all the time that you aren’t sure where you begin and the guilt ends. “I