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not sure if I’m about to crack up laughing or find a padded room and curl into a ball.
    â€œYeah, man,” I say. “Something like that.”

Chapter Four
Hadley
    The minute I walk through the door, I wish I could turn around and leave. I used to love coming home. My house in Nashville always smelled like cinnamon and clean cotton and paper from the books in my dad’s study. As soon as Dad saw me he would bellow, “Daughter, what cheer?” or “How now, sweet Hadley?” Even if I was just coming home from swimming laps or a trip to the grocery store with my mother, he always treated my return with poetic fanfare. It became a sort of game to see how he could twist his greeting into something creative and theatrical, and we kept a running list of all the phrases on a magnetic pad on the refrigerator. But ever since that day I came home to a front door peppered with fluttering strips of paper screaming at me in thick black marker, I get nauseated just thinking about being in the same room with my parents.
    In this house, there’s no cinnamon or Elizabethan welcome. Just a whole lot of quiet and averted gazes.
    This afternoon, I taught three swim lessons at the Y’s aquatic center and then swam laps until my fingertips turned pruney and my limbs felt like jelly and my mind cleared of those ugly red words on my locker. I would’ve stayed in the pool until I dissolved, but my parents expect me for dinner every night, and not even six months’ worth of strained conversation will persuade them to let me out of it. These dinners are part of the “homework” their therapist assigns every week. It’s supposed to increase a sense of interfamilial community and empathy, but the only thing it really increases is my mother’s acerbic tone of voice and the frown lines around Dad’s mouth.
    I walk into the dark kitchen. The only one to greet me is Jinx, the mottled calico cat my dad got me last month as a painfully obvious peace offering. She slinks between my legs. I sit down on the tile floor against the dishwasher, pulling Jinx into my lap and nuzzling her fuzzy head. Her purring mingles with the old clock in the living room tick-tocking toward six-thirty.
    The side door connected to the garage creaks open. The light flicks on and Dad walks in, clad in slim gray dress pants, skinny tie dangling. He slaps an armful of papers and notebooks onto the granite island. Then he disappears, returning with a couple of paper bags, grease stains leaking up the sides.
    â€œOh. Hadley.”
    I blink into the now bright kitchen.
    â€œWhy are you sitting on the floor, sweetheart?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    He starts unpacking Chinese food. “Okay. Where’s your mother?”
    â€œAgain, I don’t know. I just got home too.”
    â€œShe’s not here?” He frowns and checks the clock on the microwave. “Huh.”
    Yes.
Huh.
Mom works at Sony Music in Nashville. It’s her job to bring in new songwriting talent and then connect the songwriters with recording artists and producers. In the past, she operated on a strict nine-to-five schedule with a little traveling dropped in here and there throughout the year. She loved her job, but she loved my swim meets and cooking with Dad and trading funny stories about their day even more. But for the past few months, her own boundaries are blurring on both ends of the clock. Half the time, Dad and I start dinner without her.
    Dad sighs heavily and pulls down three plates. Jinx wanders off and I get up to set the table while he rifles through the stack of notebooks. One is red, like the journal he used to write in every Sunday morning. He started it when I was born, and one of my first memories is of him tucked into a big leather chair, pen scratching over the creamy paper as he wrote down things he thought I needed to know about life. About myself.
    I couldn’t wait to read that journal. Now the very