And not one of them could have guessed how the morning would actually go.

Chapter 5 — The Missing Piece

By six the next morning, Ruth was in the little kitchen making pancakes, because it was the only useful thing she knew how to do with her hands while her heart was breaking, and doing it anyway was its own kind of courage.

Zoe talked without stopping through breakfast — about school, about a girl in her class, about whether pancakes counted as cake.

Owen barely touched his. He was thirteen, and he knew his father was coming, and he had been carrying an anger about all of this for months that he had nowhere to put.

He had learned, over those months, to pour it into a chessboard instead — to sit with the pieces late at night and out-think the thing that was hurting him, so that he wouldn’t make it worse for his mother by falling apart.

Claire knew he did this.