He’d known they’d had a hardscrabble life. Knew about the drinking and the catting around. But he’d had no idea the depth of it. William had never said. He’d never asked either. “Jesus.”

“No. Not in my trailer. My mother was no help. She’s an alcoholic too. A bigger mess than my dad in some ways. Her biggest addiction is attention. From lots of men who aren’t my dad. She’d run off for days, sometimes weeks. Sometimes he’d go to find her. Sometimes he’d stay home and drink. His temper was always worse when he drank. He’s mean, my father. But when he’s drinking he’s cruel. Tate was his favorite target because, as you can tell, she’s not his. The rest of us are tall with dark hair. Like him. But Tate is short and blonde. She was always so full of love for us, protected us. He resented that and my mother did too in her own way. She never protected us. She lied to the cops. Lied to the doctors when we got broken bones or had to go to the emergency room.

“We got good at lying too. It was easier, you see, if we just went along with the fiction. We fell down the steps, or ran into a door. Tate would dumpster dive for clothes because we never had any. We didn’t have coats for the cold. She managed to make a connection at the thrift store. She cleaned up after they closed and they let her have stuff for us. William and Tim had jobs, so we could eat.”

She stirred, adding garlic and vegetables to the meat, and his stomach growled, despite his growing horror.

“My parents wouldn’t allow us to go on the school lunch program. They didn’t want anyone to think they couldn’t take care of their kids.” Her laugh was bitter.

“Tate stepped in between me and a fist more times than I can count. She, William and Tim paid hush money to my parents to let us live in the apartment they’d rented. And each one of us, once we could get a job, we helped with the younger ones. That’s what you do when you love your family.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t know. I…”

She held up a hand. “I know how to make spaghetti, that’s what’s for dinner, by the way. I know how to make it because Tate taught me. It was easy and relatively cheap. Kept you going all day. We ate it a lot in that little apartment Tate, Tim and William rented. For about six years after I got out of school and had a job, I refused to eat spaghetti. Every time I heard the burble of boiling pasta, or smelled spaghetti sauce, all I could think of were those fists. Of sweat filled with the stench of hopelessness and alcohol. I refused to speak of what my life was like. For a long time I refused to deal with it. I hid it, was ashamed of what I’d come from because it made me feel weak.”

“You can’t possibly think it’s your fault.” He was so angry he wanted to drive over to that trailer and beat the shit out of her father.

“I don’t. Not now.” She buttered bread and put it on a cookie sheet. “For a long, long time I did. I think it wasn’t until Tate got together with Matt that I was truly able to let it go. She got the happily-ever-after that she deserved. It made me reevaluate.

“When I was four, my father broke my arm. It was one of the few times we ever had a Christmas tree. Guilt. So he and my mother got into it. A week before Christmas. She set the tree on fire.”

“Your father broke your arm?”

“Yes. And he knocked out one of my front teeth. He beat me so bad I had to ditch school. More than once. We were raised, you see, to believe that if people knew what happened in that trailer they’d send us to juvie. Juvie was jail. We’d be separated and put in jail. I believed that for a long, long time. So we kept silent. And we hid what we came from. In varying degrees, we held ourselves responsible for the sins of other people who should have known better.”

She held his gaze. “I am not responsible for the thug my father is. I am not responsible that he’s quick with his fists and slow with his labor. I am not responsible for my mother. Or for the fact that Tate is not his. Or for the fact that I have running water and electricity and half the time they don’t. You can’t be responsible for other people’s shit, Joe. If there’s one thing in the world I know to be totally true, it’s that. You are not responsible for your father’s mental illness. Hiding it, or being ashamed of it won’t make it go away. Punishing yourself by breaking up with your girlfriend—who loves you—well, that’s not going to make it go away either.”

“Beth, you can’t love me.”

“Shut the f**k up.” She slid the pasta into the water, stirring as she held her tongue.

He reeled in more than one way. Her story, Jesus. And her declaration of love.

She turned to face him. “I understand shame. I understand fear and helplessness over people’s behavior and their health problems.”

She dug through her bag and tossed a thick stack of papers on the table. “Trey’s sister is a mental-health nurse. Buck and I had breakfast with her. There are some resources here. Names and places your dad can maybe find the help he needs. I don’t know all the details of course. She didn’t give me any diagnoses or anything like that. But she did say that it often happened that it might take a few tries to find the right course of treatment. This is brain-chemistry stuff, it takes tinkering to find the right medications and the right amounts. It’s easy, she told me, to get discouraged. But that the overwhelming percentage of the time they can find something that works.”

Joe looked through the papers. He had most of the information already from his research. There were some new things, though. And more than that, she’d done it for him. She’d gone out and spent the time and effort. To help his dad who’d tried to hurt her. To help Joe, who’d broken her damned heart and acted like a dick.