After that, Hattie said, the room simply came apart.

The cousins were on their feet, talking over each other, that frantic scandalized whispering that runs through a crowd like current.

And through the middle of it Wyatt crossed the floor to Theo, and he crouched down to the boy’s height, and he said something none of them could hear.

And the boy — who had, whatever else was true, spent four years being handled by a mother who was performing rather than mothering — reached up and put his arms around the neck of the tired man in the pressed shirt as if some animal part of him had been waiting to.

Vaughn stood up so fast his chair went over backward and cracked against the floor.