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rule was, whoever didn’t make dinner had to clean it up, which meant Brianna spent a lot of time washing dishes. Not that she minded; fair was fair, and Natalie was a much better cook than she was. But Natalie was also a
traitor
. Trying to make that jackass feel better about getting the door slammed in his face. The door slammed in his face was the
least
of what he deserved.
    She wrung out the dish cloth and hung it over the faucet. She had been glad when Dick had left,
glad
, and when Anthony had come along and swept her mom off her feet, Brianna had been happy about that. She hadn’t thought about how great it would be if her dad came back home. Never. Not
once
. She’d hoped Natalie’s dad could be the dad she’d never had, who’d let her have a skateboard and go to the movies with her.
    But Natalie’s dad wasn’t much better than Brianna’s dad, as it turned out. Except Anthony was able to keep a job, and he didn’t walk out on them. He stuck it out, even when he obviously didn’t want to, until the car crash that killed him and Brianna’s mom. So in that way he was a lot better than Brianna’s dad, but that was sort of like rating which failing student was failing better. It didn’t really matter, did it? It was still
failing
. It was still
bad
.
    Dakota came over and leaned into her, one hundred twenty pounds of solid muscle standing on her foot.
    “Ow,” she said, reaching down to touch Dakota’s coat. Dakota always knew when she was upset, and always came over to stand with her.
    “Or stand
on
me,” she said, and rescued her foot. Then she kept moving, crouching down, then sitting on the floor and burying her face in Dakota’s fur as Dakota stood there patiently, the best dog in the world, and let her cry.

Chapter Five
    “Hey.”
    Natalie was sitting in the hallway outside Dr. Dryasdust’s classroom, trying to finish her homework because she hadn’t done it over the weekend, because … well, because Brianna had been a wreck. She had never seen Brianna be a wreck before and it had scared her, it still scared her, Brianna holding on to Dakota and crying, big gulping sobs, and Natalie wished she hadn’t gone out to talk to Richard, she wished she had stayed inside with Brianna. Wished wished wished Richard had not come back to make Brianna into a wreck. Not when —
    She looked up and saw Joe smiling down at her, a little hesitant, like he thought she might have forgotten him between last week and today. “Hey, there,” she said, and he must have taken that as an invitation because he sat down next to her on the bench.
    “How was your weekend?” he asked.
    She went back to her homework. “Fine,” she said.
If a taxpaying entity adopts a different method of accounting …
    “Good,” he said. “I worked like crazy. Carl, he’s my brother — he owns the lawn-care company — he ended up twisting his ankle playing basketball so he wasn’t much use.”
    … the IRS may:
    “If people would just stick with their decisions!” she said. “You pick cash or you pick accrual, and you stick with it! Then you don’t have to worry what the IRS is going to do to you!”
    “Oops, you didn’t get your homework done in time,” Joe guessed. “Here I am distracting you.”
    “I’m not really paying any attention to you,” Natalie said and tucked her hair behind her ear, ready to give the answer one more shot in the five minutes she had before class started.
    “That one’s a little trickier than it seems,” Joe advised her.
    “Everything in the tax code is trickier than it appears,” she said darkly, and Joe laughed and said, “True enough,” and went into the classroom, leaving her in peace.
    • • •
    Matthias looked at the pedestal where his Yuan dynasty plate had stood. It wasn’t that he missed it, really; it was just that a thing that used to be there was missing and he noticed the empty spot. He didn’t want to replace it with another Yuan dynasty plate or anything like