“Because,” I said as angrily as I could, to my mother, “I haven’t trusted you since you left me for dead in Paraguay. That’s why.”

“You tell her, Charlie,” my brother said in a monotone, as my mother flipped pages, frowning.

“Sorry,” she said, after a minute, as Kim and Jeff both groaned. “I don’t—”

“Page sixty-one,” Nora hissed. “At the bottom.”

“Oh, right,” my mother said. She cleared her throat. “I’ll ruin you, Hernandez,” she said to me. “I’ll wreck you and your whole family until you beg for mercy. But mercy won’t come.” She looked over at Kim and Jeff and smiled. “That’s very good,” she said, causing Nora to throw up her hands and my dad to applaud her performance.

Because we weren’t going out, people started to come to us. The Gardners occasionally stopped by, mostly to use us as impromptu actors to hear the current draft of their screenplay read aloud. Nora would take notes for her parents, and they kept casting my mother, despite the fact that she was constantly pausing mid-scene to offer her opinions.

When we weren’t butchering the Gardners’ script with our terrible line readings or playing Risk, we’d watch movies on the old corduroy couch, all my father’s favorites. And while he’d start off telling us more trivia than we ever wanted to know about The Americanization of Emily or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, he would usually fall asleep halfway through.

Sometimes Wendy or Henry came over for the movie or to take sides in the battle for global domination—it was only with Henry’s help that I’d finally conquered Russia—but usually it was just the family, just us five. And I found I liked it. I kept thinking back to all those nights in Connecticut, when I was out the door as soon as dinner was over, yelling my plans behind me as I headed to my car, ready for my real night to begin—my time with my family just something to get through as quickly as possible. And now that I knew that the time we had together was limited, I was holding on to it, trying to stretch it out, all the while wishing I’d appreciated what I’d had earlier.

But it wasn’t like I was spending the whole night inside. I would usually sneak out later, once everyone had gone to bed. Sometimes I’d paddle the kayak across to Lucy’s dock and we’d sit for hours with our feet dangling in the water, talking. She remained oblivious to Elliot’s crush but had also given up on Brett after he’d sent her a booty-call text by accident—it had been intended for someone named Lisa. One Saturday night, we’d all met up at the beach at midnight—me, Henry, Elliot, Leland, and Lucy. Rachel and Ivy, the other lifeguards, had bought us a few six-packs in exchange for Leland taking over some of their shifts, and we’d had a party on the dark, empty beach. We’d gone nightswimming and played I Never—it turned out that Lucy pretty much Always Had—and I’d ridden back on Henry’s handlebars as it was starting to get light out, my damp hair twisted up, closing my eyes and feeling the wind against my face as he brought me home once again.

But parties on the beach or nights with Lucy were the exception. If I was sneaking out, it was usually to go next door. I knew by now which one was Henry’s bedroom, and he knew mine. Luckily, we were both on the ground floor, and I became practiced at creeping across to his house, and drumming my fingers lightly on the glass of his window. Henry would meet me, and we would either go out to the dock, or his old treehouse, if he knew Maryanne was out of town. If it had been a particularly bad day with my dad, I’d always find myself going over to Henry’s. There was something so terrible in what was happening to my father, made all the more awful because I was powerless to stop it. And as he deteriorated, each new version of him replaced the other, and I had trouble remembering when he hadn’t just worn pajamas and a robe all day, when he hadn’t struggled to eat all his meals, his hands shaking as they tried to bring food to his mouth, coughing as he tried to make himself swallow. When he hadn’t needed help to stand or sit or walk upstairs, when he’d been the one to lift our heavy boxes, and throw Gelsey over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and when I was very little, carry me in from the car after long drives when I’d pretend to fall asleep. It was getting hard to remember who he’d been last week, let alone who he’d been four months ago, when everything had seemed fine.

He had started sleeping late in the mornings, though I still found myself jerking awake at eight, expecting him to be there, tickling my feet, telling me to get a move on, that we had pancakes to eat. I continued to go to the diner on my days off, getting our food to go, and bringing it home to him. But after three trips with his toast in its Styrofoam container sitting on the counter, uneaten, I’d stopped.

After the particularly bad nights—like when he’d snap at my mother, then look immediately regretful, and like he was on the verge of tears—I’d head to Henry’s as soon as the house was quiet and sleeping. Despite our talk in the rowboat, I usually didn’t want to go into what was happening, even though he always gave me the opportunity to. Mostly, I just wanted to feel his arms around me, solid and true, while I tried to shut out the feelings that were hurting my heart with a thousand tiny pinpricks, which was somehow worse than having it broken all at once.

Whenever it got really bad at home, I would know that there was happiness waiting for me just around the corner, right next door. But whenever I found myself in a moment of happiness—laughing with Lucy, kissing Henry, conquering Asia with a shoestring army—I’d suddenly get shaken out of it, since I knew that much worse was coming down the pike, and really, I had no right to be enjoying myself when my father was going through this. And there was always the uneasy knowledge that, soon, there would be a breaking point.

“And this,” Henry said, wrapping his arms around my waist, “is where the magic happens.”

“Is it?” I asked, stretching up to kiss him. We were behind the counter at Borrowed Thyme, through the stainless steel swinging doors, back where the ovens and prep stations were. I’d had the day off, so I had come downtown to pick up some things for my mother and to visit Henry. Finding the store in a between-customers lull, he’d taken me behind the counter to show me how things worked.

“I was just about to ice some cupcakes,” he said, pointing to a mixer bowl full of white buttercream icing that, even from here, smelled delicious. “Want to help?”