Cecilia sat straighter.
“That is not HOW we said it.”
“It’s exactly HOW you said it.”
I stared at him.
“You never told me.”
“Because I handled it.”
He looked at his mother.
“Or I thought I did.”
Cecilia shook her head.
“You told us what you intended to do. We respected that.”
“No. I told you that if I was marrying Olivia, I wasn’t building a house where one kid belonged to me and the other didn’t.”
“And that was your choice,” Cecilia said. “You can’t decide how everybody else feels.”
Something in Ethan’s expression hardened.
“So all these years, you were pretending?”
“We were being kind.”
“Kind?”
Her voice rose slightly.
“We asked about school. We came to his birthdays. We were always polite to him.”
“His birthdays?” I said.
Cecilia looked at me.
“You mean the birthday we’re standing in right now?”
Nobody spoke.
I suddenly understood why Ethan looked more hurt than angry.
