Chapter 130

Liam

I burned the garlic bread.

I want it on record that I didn’t burn anything else. The pasta was fine. The sauce was out of a jar, but I had put things in it, onions and the end of a sausage and a handful of something green from the pot on the windowsill that Kaia said was basil and I had been calling “the plant.” It tasted like food. It tasted, if you didn’t look too closely, like the kind of food a person might cook on purpose.

The garlic bread I had put under the grill and then gone to find the good plates, which were in the cupboard over the fridge where nobody could reach them, because Abby had put them there when she was fourteen and said they were for special occasions. By the time I got them down, the kitchen was full of smoke and Kaia was standing in the doorway with her arms folded.

“Rule nine,” she said.

“I know.”

“You said you’d burn it.”

“I know what I said.”

She came in and opened the window over the sink withou