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He couldn’t have said anything that made her feel worse about herself.
“Lucy?” It was Nealy. He’d passed over the phone.
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “Really.”
“Never mind about that,” her mother said briskly. “I don’t care if you’re a grown woman. We want you home.”
“I—I can’t.” She bit her lip. “I’m not done running away yet.”
Nealy, of all people, couldn’t argue with that, and she didn’t try. “When do you think you’ll be done?”
“I’m … not sure.”
“Let me talk to her!” Tracy shrieked in the background.
Nealy said, “We had no idea you were so unhappy.”
“I wasn’t. You can’t think that. It’s just—I can’t explain.”
“I wish you’d try.”
“Let me have the phone!” Tracy cried.
“Promise you’ll stay in touch,” her mother said. “And promise you’ll call your grandfather.”
Before Lucy could promise anything, Tracy grabbed the phone. “Why haven’t you called me? This is all Meg’s fault. I hate her. You should never have listened to what she said. She’s jealous because you were getting married and she wasn’t.”
“Trace, I know I disappointed you, but this isn’t Meg’s fault.”
Her baby sister Button had turned into a volcano of eighteen-year-old outrage. “How can you love somebody one minute and then not love them the next?”
“It wasn’t exactly like that.”
“You’re being selfish. And stupid.”
“I’m sorry I hurt you.” Before she lost her courage, she needed to get the rest of this over with. “Put the others on, will you?”
In the next ten minutes, she learned that Andre still talked on the phone to Ted, that Holly was auditioning for a part in a play, and that Charlotte had mastered “Drunken Sailor” on the guitar. Each conversation was more painful than the last. Only after she’d hung up did it register that all three of them had posed the question her parents had never raised.
“Lucy, where are you?”
Panda came up behind her on the deck and took the phone before she could check his call log. Was he in touch with the tabloids or not? He disappeared back inside, and when she finally went in herself, he was watching a baseball game. “I need to make another call,” she said.
He studied her. “Phone’s been acting up lately. Give me the number and I’ll put it in for you.”
“I can handle it.”
“It’s temperamental.”
She had to stop playing games. “I want to see your phone.”
“I know.”
“If you don’t have anything to hide, you’ll let me look at it.”
“Who says I don’t have anything to hide?”
He was enjoying himself, and she didn’t like it. “You know everything about me, but I don’t know any more about you than I did eleven days ago. I don’t even know your real name.”
