Mein Sohn sagte, seine Frau wolle mir eine Lektion erteilen, also haben sie mir zu Weihnachten nichts geschenkt. Sie wussten nicht, was in meiner Handtasche war.

“I had two envelopes in my bag today, Tyler.” I picked up my handbag from the floor and set it on my lap. “They look exactly the same. The other one is still in here. I told myself, if there was one thing under that tree with my name on it, one card, one candy cane, I’d give you the other one. And I’d deal with your aunt by myself, and you’d never even have to know.” I folded my hands on top of the bag. “I gave you an hour.”

The fire popped. Nobody moved.

“What’s in the other one?” Tyler said.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. Brooke understood before he did.

I watched it land on her. The kitchen with the white oak cabinets. The double oven.

I watched her do the arithmetic in her head, and I watched her get the answer, and I watched her face change from cornered to furious. She bent down and snatched the new bag up off the floor.

“Fine,” she said. “Fine. You want it back? Take it back.”

She crossed the room in three steps and dropped it hard.

It landed on the arm of the sofa right beside me, slid off, and h!t the floor at my feet with its gold chain spilling out like a dropped necklace. Patty gasped. Caleb’s tablet followed it all the way down.

“Take it all back!” Brooke said. “Take the truck! Take the stupid bag! That’s what you do, right? That’s the whole point! You give people things so you can take them away when they don’t do what you say!”

I looked down at the bag. Then I picked it up off the floor, and smoothed the leather where it had creased, and set it on the side table next to my coffee cup.

“Thank you, Brooke,” I said. “I will.”

She stared at me. I think it was the first time in three years she’d ever really looked at me.

“Tyler,” she said, without taking her eyes off me. “Say something.”

Tyler was looking at the truck keys in his hand.

“Tyler!”

“Did you know?” he said quietly. “About this. About Kessler. About Exhibit F.” He looked up at her. “When you told me we should skip her gift this year. When you said it would be good for her. When you said, she needs a boundary, Ty, she’ll respect you more. Did you know you were going to do this?”

“It was for us,” Brooke said. Her eyes were shining. “It was for our future. Do you know what it’s like, living in her house? Paying off my cards with her money? Eating at her table every Sunday, and smiling, and saying thank you, thank you, thank you, like a dog that sits for a treat? Do you know how humiliating that is?”

“So you thought you’d humiliate her instead,” Ray said.

“Stay out of this, Ray!”

“It’s my brother’s house,” Ray said. “I’ll stay out of whatever I want.”

Brooke turned back to Tyler.

“Ty. Please. Let’s just go home and talk about this.”

“Home,” I said. “You mean the townhouse.”

Brooke spun on me.

“You can’t do this,” she said. “You can’t just throw us out. I’ll call a lawyer. I’ll call everyone. I’ll tell everyone in Harrow Creek what you did to your own son on Christmas morning.”

“You’ll call Grant Kessler,” I said. “Tell him Ruth Abernathy says hello.”

Brooke went white. Tyler stood in the middle of my living room for a long time. The truck keys in one hand.

The three pages in the other. Then he did something I didn’t expect. He walked over to the fireplace and set the truck keys on the mantel.

Right next to Walt’s photograph.

“Tyler,” Brooke said. “You’re choosing her?”

He turned back to me.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “About the court thing. I swear to God, Mom, I didn’t know.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“But the rest of it.” He swallowed. “The nothing under the tree. I did know that. I agreed to it.” He looked at his feet. “I thought it was funny. I thought you’d laugh.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s the part I’ll have to forgive.”

“Ty, come on,” Brooke said. She had her coat on now. Her keys in her hand. “We’re leaving.”

Tyler looked at her. Then at me. Then at the mantel.

And I watched my son make a choice. He picked up his coat.

“I need to think,” he said. “I need to—I can’t be here right now. I’m sorry, Mom.”

He followed his wife out the door. He didn’t take the truck. He didn’t take the box of ornaments, either.

He didn’t know yet that there was one.

He got into the passenger seat of her leased crossover, and she backed out of my driveway so fast she clipped the edge of the lawn and left a long brown scar across the snow.

I watched them go from Walt’s chair. I didn’t get up. Darlene left five minutes later.

She didn’t say goodbye. At the door, she stopped, and turned around, and I thought for one moment that she was going to say she was sorry.

“You’re making a mistake, Jo,” she said instead. “You’re going to regret this. I’m the only family you’ve got left.”

“No,” I said. “You’re the only family I had left.”

She closed the door very softly behind her. That was worse, somehow, than if she’d slammed it. Ray and Patty stayed.

They did the dishes.

Ray carried the ham back to the kitchen and wrapped it in foil and didn’t say a single word for twenty minutes, and then, drying the good china with the gold rim, he said, “Walt would’ve thrown the whole lot of them in the snowbank.”

“Walt would’ve given them another chance,” I said.

Ray thought about that.