Page 191 of Sweet Ruin

Like no one will ever know we were here.

No one except for us.

We go back separately.

That’s my idea, though Kane doesn’t like it. I make him take it anyway.

He wants to walk me down the stairs and into dinner with his hand between my shoulder blades and my hair looking exactly the way it looks. He wants my mother to see it. He wants Vivian and Connor to see it.

“No,” I tell him at the top of the stairs.

“Why not?”

“Because if we do it that way, it stops being mine and turns into a whole big move.” I get my hair pinned back up. “It becomes something I did to her. And then she’s in it. I want her to know it had nothing at all to do with them. With any of them.”

Kane’s jaw grinds, but he acknowledges my point with a brief nod.

“I’m not giving her that,” I say. “She’s had enough of my things.”

“Alright,” he concedes. “Go. I’ll follow in a minute.”

I go down first. I stop in the powder room, which Aunt Sherry has vacated, and put my face back together with what’s in my purse. Then I come out, take my chair, and chug half a glass of water.

Kane comes in two minutes later. He sits down beside me, puts his hand back on my thigh, where it was before, and takes up his fork.

Nobody says anything.

But my cousin Jenna looks at me and then at him and then very quickly back down at her plate. Her ears go red.

Vivian doesn’t take long to chime in. “Well!” she says brightly. “Dee, we should talk about the wedding. Because obviously I have to ask you about cake.”

Everybody looks at her. Then back at me.

I take a bite of potato. “No.”

“No, what?”

“No, we shouldn’t talk about the wedding.” I chew and swallow. “The potatoes really are good, Mom. Did you use butter or the margarine?”

“Um… butter,” my mother says faintly, every bit as confused as her youngest daughter.

“You can tell.”

Vivian sits there with her mouth open, waiting, but I give her absolutely nothing, and my God, it feels so good to do that.

Under the table, Kane’s thumb strokes once across my knee. “There’s one more thing for you,” he says, near my ear. “After dinner. Outside.”

“A gift?”

“Mm.”

“You have got to stop doing that.”

“Never.”

Dinner breaks up around eight. There’s no dessert, as promised, so people drift toward coffee and the freezer-burned Entenmann’s that Uncle Bub chiseled out and defrosted in the microwave. It comes out with a cold middle.

I get my coat out of the hall closet myself.