“I’ll call and cancel it with you. Then we’ll work out repayment.”
“You’re going to throw away our marriage in your mother’s foyer?”
He stood.
“I don’t know what happens to our marriage yet.”
Harper searched his face, looking for somewhere to press.
Then she looked at me.
“You should hear what he said before you decide he’s the good one.”
Alex went still.
“He said he couldn’t spend another Christmas listening to you talk about Peter.”
The letter opener slipped beneath my palm and struck the wood.
Alex closed his eyes.
I waited for him to deny it.
“I said I didn’t know how to do another holiday where everything made Mom cry,” he said.
His voice had become rough.
“Harper said you wanted a quiet Christmas. I said maybe that would be easier.”
“Easier for whom?” I asked.
He looked at me then.
“For me.”
The answer hurt more because he did not soften it.
“And when you found out I’d been excluded?”
He rubbed both hands over his face.
“I knew I should call you.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
Harper shifted closer to him, as if his admission had opened a way back to her.
“So don’t act like this was all—”
Alex moved away.
“I was a coward. You lied about the money. Both happened.”
I looked toward the dining room, where Peter’s chair sat beneath the window.
For months I had wondered whether speaking his name made people uncomfortable. Now I knew my son had counted that discomfort among the things he wanted a holiday to spare him.
“I need you both to leave,” I said.
Alex nodded immediately.
Harper glanced at the receipts.
“Are we really leaving it like this?”
“No,” I said. “But we aren’t finishing it while you use my husband to defend what you did.”
Alex put the envelope beside my spreadsheet. He did not reach for me.
At the door, he stopped.
“I’ll call tomorrow. You don’t have to answer.”
When the latch clicked, I sat on the bench he had vacated.
I cried without worrying who found it difficult.
