Dexter’s POV
Ivy asked me what I wanted and I sat with it.
Not in the polite way, not the two-second pause before a prepared answer. I actually sat with it. I put my coffee down and I looked at my sister across the kitchen table and I let the question do what it was designed to do which was go somewhere I had been managing it away from for a very long time.
What do you want.
Not what are you offering. Not what is manageable. What do you want.
I thought about my parents.
I had not chosen to think about them, the thought arrived the way it always did when something pressed against the decision I made at twelve years old, uninvited and precise and carrying the particular weight of a hallway I had stood in on a Thursday evening while my mother cried behind a closed door. My father’s bag
