Page 60 of Stay Away from Him

“What do you have there?” she asked, eager to get out of the moment.

“Grilled flatbreads,” Thomas said. “Thought I’d take advantage of the unusually warm weather.” He extended the plate and the grown-ups gathered round, peering at what he was offering. “Pear, chèvre, pink Himalayan sea salt, some fresh rosemary, and a light balsamic drizzle.”

“Ooh,” Toby said, the first to grab for a slice of flatbread. “Thomas is thebestcook. You knew that, didn’t you, Melissa?”

She shook her head. “I had no idea. I’m learning new things about him every day.”

Thomas shrugged. “Second best, maybe,” he says. “Everyone knows you’re the best cook in the neighborhood, Toby.”

Thomas offered the plate to Melissa. She grabbed a piece andbit into it as Thomas watched. The perfect blend of flavors washed over her tongue: sweet and salt, herb and acid, a bit of char from the grill. “Wow,” she said. “You’re full of surprises.”

Thomas beamed. “Save some room. Cedar plank salmon for dinner.” Then he looked down at Bradley. “How ’bout it, bud? Want to try one of these? Fish later?”

Bradley made a face, and the adults in the room chuckled.

“We’ll figure something out,” Thomas said. “I probably have some chicken nuggets or mac and cheese around here somewhere.”

“You sure that’s okay?” Melissa asked.

“My girls were little once,” he said. “I know how to deal with picky eaters.” He turned to Bradley again. “The girls are around here somewhere. Want to go upstairs and see what Kendall and Rhiannon are up to?”

Bradley shook his head and pressed his face against Melissa’s leg, wrinkling the folds of her dress where it fell over her thigh. She tensed, trying to keep her balance as Bradley pushed too hard against her.

“Come on, bud,” she said. “You had fun with them the last time.”

But Bradley shook his head again. He wouldn’t even meet her eyes. “Sorry,” Melissa said, giving Thomas an apologetic look. “I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

Thomas assured her it was okay. Soon he breezed back to the kitchen and to his grill on the back deck, leaving Melissa with the others. She sat and tried to enjoy her wine and appetizer, tried to participate in adult conversation—but she couldn’t get over her embarrassment at the way Bradley was still clinging to her. Kids were weird, their reactions to situations unpredictable. Last time they were here, Kendall was able to coax him away, but now she was nowhere to be found, and Bradley didn’t seem excited about the idea of going to find her. And Melissa wasn’t sure why.

She always struggled to know whether her son’s reactions to things were random, or if they had a cause she should have been digging into. Sometimes, since starting kindergarten, Bradley would be hesitant to walk into school when she dropped him off in the morning, and each time she wondered—was he just having an off day? Or was there something bad waiting for him in school? Was he being bullied? Was a classmate being mean to him? Sometimes her mind would go all the way to the worst, most paranoid possibility: What if he was being abused? What if something truly terrible was happening in that building? She knew these thoughts probably didn’t reflect the truth, but kids could be so bad at talking about what was really going on in their lives. Bradley’s silence left so much room for Melissa’s imagination to dream up terrible explanations.

She was struggling with a similar thought spiral right now. Last time he was here, Bradley seemed to warm to Kendall and, later, even to Rhiannon. But what if he didn’t? What if he was just pretending to like Thomas’s daughters because he sensed it was important to Melissa? And what if Kendall and Rhiannon were doing the same, trying to get along with Bradley because they knew it was important to their dad? Rhiannon had been cold, Kendall polite—but they both could have been more hesitant about their dad dating, more hesitant aboutMelissa, than they let on directly. And now, their hesitation might have blossomed into full-on rebellion. How else to explain their absence right now, their refusal to come down and say hello to Melissa and Bradley?

She cast her mind back, tried to remember what Bradley had told her when Kendall and Rhiannon babysat him. They’d played together, taken a walk through the woods at the back of Thomas’s yard, then Rhiannon had made him a snack and sat with him while Kendall did some homework. It all seemed innocuous enough at the time—but then Melissa recalled that Bradley had also gotten scared by Kendall telling him that a coyote lived in those woods. Anolder kid telling a scary story about the legendary neighborhood predator, and Bradley hadn’t liked it. Maybe Bradley’s hesitance to go find the girls was as simple as that, his remembering that one of them had made him afraid.

That left the girls themselves, and why they weren’t coming down to say hello. Thomas’s girls had been through real trauma with the loss of their mother. A parent dating someone new was hard enough; add the murder of a loved one to that difficulty, and it was no wonder Rhiannon and Kendall were being distant.

Thomas and Melissa might truly love each other, might have beenin lovewith each other—but the rest of it wasn’t going to be easy. A single dinner wasn’t going to make them one big happy family.

“Melissa?” Lawrence asked.

Melissa blinked. “Yes?”

“You look like you’re a million miles away.”

“Do I?” She looked around the circle, feeling everyone’s eyes on her. Amelia studied her with an inscrutable look. She forced a laugh. “Sorry. Long week. I’m just tired.”

Lawrence nodded in a way that said he didn’t believe her.

Then Thomas came walking back in, apron off and draped over his forearm, the way a waiter at a fancy restaurant might carry a white cloth napkin.

“Dinner,” he said, “is served.”

***

The meal was terribly awkward, as Melissa somehow knew it would be. She and Thomas sat next to each other, and occasionally he let his hand rest on her leg, his fingers brushing the bare skin at her knee where the hem of her dress rode up. It was the first he’d touched her in days, but she was too distracted to enjoy it, toimagine Thomas’s hands moving higher, pushing her dress up her body. Sitting together with their three kids around them, Melissa felt already like a wife and husband, a mom and a dad, which made Thomas’s touch feel chaste, nonsexual.

The kids simply watched them, not talking. Rhiannon’s look was a glare, a dark teenage scowl. She picked at her food—the salmon Thomas brought in on a smoking cedar plank, green beans swimming in butter, crisp garlicky roasted potatoes. Her head was mostly down, hair hanging around her ears, but she peered up at Melissa from under her lowered brow in a way that reminded Melissa of the juvenile delinquent fromA Clockwork Orange, a movie Carter, her ex, made her watch years ago.

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