Page 51 of A Thousand Little Goodbyes

“I’ve already burdened you enough for one lifetime.” Scarlett spoke so quietly that Chrissie had to strain to hear her. “Especially since I—”

Chrissie’s phone rang before Scarlett could finish her sentence. She was tempted to ignore the call, since it seemed like the two of them werefinallygetting somewhere, but one glance at the screen showed her that it was from her daughter.

Chrissie winced. “Sorry. It’s Kat. I have to take it.”

“Of course you do,” Scarlett said in a voice that was difficult to interpret. Even though Scarlett knew Chrissie didn’t have a choice—that Kat, of necessity, had to come first—she’d always harbored an affectionate resentment over their relationship.

“Hey, Kitty Kat. What’s up? You caught me at a good time. We’re stopped at this cute little town—”

“Don’t you dare call me Kitty Kat right now.”

Chrissie pinched the bridge of her nose to keep her sigh from escaping. She should have known that a call could only presage disaster. “Is everything okay?” she asked, already knowing what the answer would be. “Lily? The cat? Walsh?”

Kat’s snort of derision was loud enough to fill the whole car. “I’m surprised you managed to list Coach last. That must have taken all your self-control—Oh, wait. You don’t have any.”

Scarlett waggled her fingers as if to take the phone, but Chrissie didn’t hand it over. Something in Kat’s voice felt different than her usual angst. This was more controlled, somehow. More dangerous. In some deep, untouched part of Chrissie’s brain, she registered the voiceas an exact copy of her own when she was doing her best not to give herself away, but this wasn’t the moment for self-reflection. Not until the bomb ticking inside her daughter was defused.

“I’m not a mind reader, Kat. Just tell me what I did so I can fix it.”

It was the wrong thing to say. “Lily has her dad’s phone password. Did you know that? She gets on there all the time to buy stuff from Amazon.”

“O-kay… Do you want my password? It’s pretty easy. It’s your birth date, only backwards.”

“Omigod, Mom. I’ve known that for like ten years.” Something like a sob sounded. “Lily saw the picture. We both did. Howcouldyou?”

In that moment, Chrissie felt the earth open up from underneath her. In the grand scheme of things, her teenage daughter learning that she was a hot-blooded thirty-four-year-old woman who wore bikinis and took pictures of herself and sometimes accidentally sent them to hot-blooded forty-eight-year-old men wasn’t important. Awkward, yes. Unfortunate, sure. But Chrissie was literally sitting inside a car with her best friend in the whole world—a best friend who had scar tissue where her breasts used to be, and who may or may not be facing a long road of recovery ahead of her.

Friends got sick. Brothers died. Parents stopped caring. The world freakinghurt, and Chrissie was tired of tiptoeing around a girl who’d never experienced that truth for herself.

“For crying out loud, Kat, calm down. It’s just a picture.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Scarlett clapping her hands in support of this response, but Kat literally howled into the phone.

“It’s not just anything!” Kat cried. “It’severything. Coach is theoneadult who doesn’t talk down to me, who isn’t nice to me just because he, like, pushed me out of his vagina or whatever. And now you’re trying to take that away from me, too?”

“I’m not—”

“What? Secretly pining after my volleyball coach? Dangling your naked body in front of him until it ruins everything?”

“Kat, don’t—”

“It’s fine. Whatever. You already drove my dad so far away that he wants nothing to do with me. Why not do it again with Coach? Or my science teacher who thinks I might have a chance of a scholarship to OSU? Heck—there’s a super-nice old man who always smiles at me when I grab a breakfast sandwich at the gas station on the way to school. You might as well shove your tits at him and see what happens.”

The bottom of the earth closed up again. Chrissie planted her feet so firmly against the gas that if the car had been on, they’d have shot through the parking lot back onto the freeway.

“Kathleen Genevieve Thomas, what did you just say to me?”

A scream sounded, so loud it could have belonged to a fire truck.

But it didn’t. It was her daughter, her beating heart, the best thing she’d ever done.

“It’s not fair,” Kat wailed. “You’ll ruin everything. You’ll take him in and mother him andsmotherhim. And when he can’t take it another second, he’ll disappear just like my dad and my grandparents and everyone else.”

Chrissie didn’t want to say it. She didn’t want to ask.

She did anyway.

“And that’s not enough for you?I’mnot enough?”