“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
“I don’t want a scene,” he muttered.
“You lost the right to a quiet conversation when you answered a photo of your premature daughters with one word.”
His face changed. “Helen—”
“Cute,” I said. “That was your word.”
Claire looked at him sharply. “You saw your babies in the hospital and sent that?”
Then he shifted into the tone I remembered from every argument we had ever had.
He snapped, “I was on a ship with bad reception. I didn’t know what to say.”
Then he shifted into the tone I remembered from every argument we had ever had, the one where he spoke like the victim of other people’s reactions.
“I came back because we need to settle things like adults,” he said. “The divorce. The finances. The house.”
“The house?”
“We can’t afford to drag this out,” he said. “We need to be practical.”
