“I wouldn’t let you today, either,” I say. “Didn’t seem to stop you.”
Ivy glares down at her shoes again. “Because I think he peed himself when the cops showed up.”
I hold in a laugh at that. Ibethe did. I must not hold in my happiness well enough, because Ivy turns her glare back to me.
“So you got your way,” she says. “Can we just forget about it now?”
“Absolutely not,” Kim says.
Ivy lets out a whine, and at that exact moment, I know for sure that my sweet, responsible little girl has morphed into a hormonal teenager right before my eyes. I didn’t realize how fully until now. “It’s not like I did anything all that bad!” she says. “I just wanted to kiss a boy.”
“And how did that go?” I ask.
Ivy looks surprised that I asked. Her mouth settles into a sullen line. “Meh.”
Kim leans forward with her hands on her knees. “You may not have meant to do anything all that bad. But what you did was put yourself in a lot of danger.”
Ivy shakes her head. “Christopher isn’t—”
Kim talks right over her. “You still could have been kidnapped. You could have been raped, Ivy.”
Ivy’s whole body tenses, as does Kim’s. I reach for Kim’s hand.This is good. It needed to be said.
“Christopher isn’t dangerous,” Ivy says quietly. “He bought me ice cream.”
I want to deconstruct the fallacy in that statement, but instead I nod. “I’m glad he wasn’t dangerous. But you couldn’t have known that for sure, and even if you could, we’re your parents.There are some decisions we let you make for yourself, but not this one. We’ve told you over and over again that we don’t want you talking to this boy, and you keep breaking the rules over and over again to do so.”
“Right,” Ivy says bitterly. “But you get to do whatever you want because you’re the grown-ups, so you’re allowed to ruin my life.”
“What do you want us to do, Ivy?” I ask. “What do you think we should do in this situation?”
Ivy looks dubious that I’ve asked this, and I take that as a win.The more unpredictable we are, the less she seems to hunker down and whine that her life isn’t fair. “I want you to break up and for things to go back to the way they were.”
“Why?” Kim asks.
I’m pretty sure it was because we were easier to manipulate when we were both miserable and apart, but I don’t think throwing that in Ivy’s face at this moment is going to help.
Ivy bites her lip. “Because I don’t want anything to change.”
“You weren’t upset like this when I was dating Simone,” I point out. “Or when your mother was dating Roger. And if we’d married other people, things still would have changed. So why is this such a problem for you?”
Ivy wraps her arms around her waist and says softly, “You were never going to marry those people. You didn’t really like them.”
I’m at once impressed and surprised that she knows this. “That’s true,” I say. “Your mother and I were never really happy with other people.That’s part of why we’re back together now, because we want to be happy in the way we only are when we’re together.”
“That’s not true,” Ivy says. “You were happy. You’d be fine.”
“No, I wasn’t.” I’m not sure if I ought to be disclosing things like this to my rebellious twelve-year-old, but nothing else I’ve done has worked, so I figure I can’t make the situation worse. “I was miserable without your mother. You think I was happy because I was happy to have you, happy to be with you and Luke, but apart from that, I was lonely and I missed your mother more than you’ll ever know.”
Ivy stares at me like I’m betraying her, and I can’t help but feel the same. “You asked what I want, but it doesn’t matter, does it?” she snaps.
My throat tightens. I shouldn’t have told Ivy the truth, because it only makes me more angry when she throws it back in my face. “I am so disappointed in you,” I say to her. “I can’t believe you’re so selfish that you can’t be slightly inconvenienced for other people’s happiness.”
“I’m disappointed in you, too!” Ivy yells at me. “You don’t care about us at all!”
“Yes, we do,” Kim says. Her voice is tired, and I’m sure Ivy can hear that as well as I do. “What we don’t understand is what you’re losing that is so important to you. Is this really about having two bedrooms?”
Ivy is quiet for a moment, drawing in on herself. “Lukas and I were always the most important thing to both of you.”
