“She hit someone. And she wasextremelyprovoked.”
“From what you’ve said,” Oliver reminded me, “she beat another girl’s head on a table. That isn’t teenage hijinks. That’s a disturbing level of violence.”
I propped my hips on the kitchen counter and leaned. “Okay, but what do you want to say about that? ‘Hi, Jasmine, I just want to tell you that I’m concerned you might be a danger to yourself and others’?”
“Perhaps we could”—Oliver’s mouth seemed to be getting dry—“invite her to see things from Trish’s perspective?”
“Trish said it was Jaz’s fault her mother tried to kill herself,” I pointed out. “Whatperspectivecould she possibly have to make that okay?”
“The perspective where it led to her head being bounced off of a table?” suggested Oliver, mildly. “I’m not saying we make this about blame. I’m suggesting we take a restorative approach.”
I felt my own lips tighten. “Will the restorative approach involve writing any kind of letter?”
“That’s not funny.”
“How about,” I tried, “whatever we decide, we decide on itlater. The school will want to be involved anyway, and it’s probably best for”—I gritted my inner teeth and used the mature parenting name—“Jasmine if we work with them instead of…you know, like…not against them but not with them?”
“Orthogonally from them?” suggested Oliver.
“Yeah, that.”
Oliver gave me aYou have made a sound argument and I acknowledge itnod. “Very well, we’ll revisit the matter once we’ve had a chance to confer with the school.”
“We have a meeting on Monday,” I told him. Jaz had warned me that there’d be a lot of meetings. I hadn’t expected the next one quite this quickly.
“Good.” Oliver nodded again. “Just as long as Jasmine understands that this is a punishment, not a holiday.”
I gave him a helpless look. And not the sexy kind of helpless or even the romantic kind of helpless. “Oliver, I am absolutely certain that she doesn’t think staying with us is a holiday.”
“What does that mean?” he asked, a touch sharply.
“It means,” I said, “that she just really misses her mum.”
“Her mother was neglectful.”
That was…strictly true. And considering the space Oliver was in right now,strictly truewas all he’d listen to. But this wasn’t astrictly truekind of situation. It was a messy, complex, stabs-you-in-the-heart-fucks-you-in-the-head, family-matters-but-also-hurts-you-but-also-still-matters situation. I could see that; I could see itsoclearly. And Oliver couldn’t. Or wouldn’t let himself. Even though deep down, I knew he understood as well as I did.
Which meant I was going to have to remind him.
Which meant I was having to go there.
Not all the way there. But more of the way there than I really wanted.
I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and said as calmly and not-trying-to-start something-ly as I could possibly manage, “I suppose you don’t miss your dad then?”
Oliver stiffened. “That’s a completely different situation. I know my parents weren’t perfect, but things never got so bad that the state had to intervene.”
“No,” I admitted, partly out of fear of escalation and partly because he wastechnicallycorrect on that one. “But they got so bad that when David died, you dropped a truth-nuke on his funeral, so… I mean. Youmustunderstand that it’s possible to have complicated feelings about a parent.”
I could see Oliver breathing. He wasn’t like me when it came to emotions. They didn’t scare him in the same way. But he did have very particular ideas about what you should feel and when and about who, and he didn’t like deviating from them. “I suppose,” he said, very carefully and very slowly, “that you raise a valid point.”
“I do,” I said, trying not to sound actively triumphant. “I raise as fuck a point that is valid as shit.”
“You’re also extremely mature.”
“Matureas shit,” I agreed.
Oliver arched an eyebrow.
