“Maybe now you’ll stop talking,” he said, his voice completely flat, as if he were issuing a routine correction to a junior clerk at his office.

He didn’t look me in the eye, and his mouth didn’t twitch.

Sloan leaned her elbow on the quartz island, lifted her cigarette, and flicked the long gray ash straight into the clean blue porcelain bowl I had hand-washed and dried on the counter an hour before dinner.

“I told you she was getting more persistent,” Sloan said, taking a small sip from her water glass.

Mark walked around the end of the counter, stepped right past me without looking down, and put his arm around Sloan’s waist.