It was easier to carry it alone than to be abandoned a second time by people she loved.

She could see, watching Ruth’s stricken face across the table, that she had misjudged them — but she could not regret the caution. Caution was the only thing that had kept her family fed.

Chapter 4 — George Arrives

At eleven o’clock that night, there was another knock at the door. It was George — Claire’s father-in-law, Ruth’s husband, a retired military engineer who had, it turned out, gotten in his own car in Indianapolis the moment Ruth’s first stunned phone call reached him, and driven the whole way down without stopping.

He was a big, quiet, unhurried man, and when Claire opened the door he simply looked at her for a moment, taking in her face, and then said, “Well. Let’s have it, then.”

He did not shout. That was the thing Claire would remember. A lot of men would have shouted, would have made the next hour about their own outrage, and she would have had to manage that on top of everything else.

George did none of it.