Chapter 2

Ethan came home at one in the morning.

He saw me waiting on the barstool, and his shoulders went stiff.

"Jax was hysterical, Elena. Two hours to calm him down. He needed me more. Clara will get over it."

I didn't argue. I just looked at him.

Ethan loved to call himself a self-made man - built it all from nothing, carrying this family on his back. I never corrected him.

There was one contract framed on his office wall. The Davis account. He called landing it the proudest day of his life. He never once asked why a company that size had picked a mid-tier firm like his.

I knew why. I just wasn't ready to say it out loud.

"Did you even ask how she played tonight?" I said.

"I'll buy her a bike this weekend. I've got a headache." He set his glass in the sink and went up to bed, leaving his phone on the counter.

A second later it lit up. A text from Lila.

Jax keeps asking when you're coming back. You're the only dad he's ever known. He needs you way more than some piano contest, lol.

For months I'd told myself Lila was just a lonely coworker. But no lonely woman texts another woman's husband at one in the morning and calls it about her son.

Upstairs, Clara's door was open, her room dark except for the streetlight.

She wasn't asleep. She was sitting on the floor by her closet, holding the trophy she'd won.

As I watched, she set it inside an old cardboard box and buried it under a pile of winter boots, where no one would ever find it.

She didn't cry. When she finally spoke, she wasn't talking to me. She was talking to the empty closet.

"Next year I just won't invite him."

I stood in the doorway and didn't trust my voice.

Downstairs, Ethan's phone lit up again with Lila's name.

And three days later, the blizzard came.