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thing for him to do. He came by when our parents weren’t there—or when they were out cold—and he’d (God bless him) brought us supplies whenever he could. But that meant he hadn’t been present like we had when the girls were babies, and he hadn’t had as much opportunity to bond with them. Cameron and Tolliver and I had taken care of Mariella and Gracie. On the nights when bad memories woke me up and wouldn’t let me sleep, I got scared all over again when I thought of what might have happened to the girls if we hadn’t been there. That wasn’t the girls’ concern, though—and it shouldn’t be.
    “So you haven’t talked to Iona lately.” I had to think in the here and now.
    “No.” Mark looked at me, a question on his face.
    “You know that Iona’s heard from your dad?” It was my stepfather’s handwriting I’d seen on the letter protruding from the stack of mail.
    Mark would never be a successful poker player, because he didn’t look anything but guilty. I had to smile at his obvious relief when the waitress picked that moment to take our orders.
    But that smile didn’t sit on my lips for long. I was scared to look sideways at Tolliver.
    When the waitress had bustled off, I opened my hands to Mark, indicating it was time for him to come clean.
    “Well, yeah, I was gonna tell you about that,” he said, looking down at his silverware.
    “What were you going to tell us, brother?” Tolliver asked, his voice even and pleasant and forced.
    “I got a letter from Dad a couple weeks ago,” Mark said. No, he confessed it. Then he waited for Tolliver to give him absolution—but Tolliver wasn’t about to. We both knew Mark had responded to the letter, or he wouldn’t be so hangdog.
    “Dad’s alive, then,” Tolliver said, and anyone but me would have called his voice neutral.
    “Yeah, he’s got a job. He’s clean and sober, Tol.”
    Mark had always had a tender heart for his father. And he’d always been incredibly gullible where his dad was concerned.
    “Matthew’s been out of jail how long?” I asked, since Tolliver wasn’t responding to Mark’s assertion. I’d never been able to call Matthew Lang “Father.”
    “Um, a month,” Mark said. He folded the little paper ring that had circled his silverware and napkin. He unfolded it and folded it again. This time he compressed it into a smaller rectangle. “He got early release for good behavior. After I wrote back, he called me. He wants to reconnect with his family, he says.”
    I was sure that (entirely coincidentally) Matthew also wanted money and maybe a place to stay. I wondered if Mark truly believed his father, if he could really be that foolish.
    Tolliver didn’t say a word.
    “Has he been in touch with your uncle Paul or your aunt Miriam?” I asked, struggling to fill the silence.
    Mark shrugged. “I don’t know. I never call them.”
    While it wasn’t technically true that Tolliver and I were each other’s only adult family, with the exception of Mark it might as well have been. Matthew Lang’s siblings had been hurt and disgusted too often by Matthew to want to maintain any relationship with him, and unfortunately that exclusion had spread outward to include Matthew’s kids. Mark and Tolliver could have used help—could have used a lot of help—but that would have entailed dealing with Matthew, who had been too difficult and frightening for his more conventional siblings. As a result, Tolliver had cousins he barely knew.
    I wasn’t sure exactly how he felt about Paul’s and Miriam’s self-preserving decisions, but he’d never made any attempt to contact them in recent years, when Matthew had been safely behind bars. I guess that spoke for itself.
    “What’s Dad doing?” Tolliver said. His voice was ominously quiet, but he was holding together.
    “He’s working at a McDonald’s. The drive-through, I think. Or maybe he’s cooking.”
    I was sure Matthew Lang wasn’t the first disbarred lawyer to work the