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“What?” They’re all looking at me and I can tell I’ve just caught them talking about something they don’t want me to know about. I hate that. “What?” I say again. Mom leaves the room. Aunt Em looks at Dad. “She is seventeen, Gerry.” Dad looks at me as if he’s trying to decide if I actually am seventeen. “What?” I say again. Now I really have to know what’s going on. In the back of my mind I’m thinking it has to do with Ronny and Friday night, but there’s no way they could know about that. As if Ronny’s going to call and say, I think I had sex with Emily on Friday night but I can’t remember much about it because I passed out. “But—,” says Dad and looks at the doorway where Mom just made her exit. Then I suddenly think that something’s wrong with Mom and they don’t want me to know. “Is something wrong with Mom?” I’m very worried and they can see it. “Okay, tell her if you want,” says Dad and he leaves the room too. It can’t be anything about Mom because of the way he said “if you want,” like it’s nothing that he has to tell me. It’s a choice. Aunt Em’s choice, for some reason. I don’t say What? again, but I’m thinking it. Aunt Em looks at her hands spread on the kitchen table like someone’s about to paint her fingernails. Then she looks at me. “You remember Cynthia Maxwell.” It isn’t a question, so I don’t say anything. “Well, she phoned this morning. I was surprised she wasn’t back in Montreal by now. Anyway, she invited me to tea at her hotel.” I just stand there because that bit of information sounds like only the beginning. Aunt Em sighs and stops looking at her hands. “She told me she and Dad had an affair for twenty-three years. A relationship, she called it.” My brain just can’t handle that information. Any of it. It’s just too weird. Granddad and Cynthia Maxwell? Twenty-three years? Twenty-three! “I agree,” says Aunt Em, even though I haven’t said anything. She read my face. “That’s too weird,” is all I can manage to say. I don’t like to think of my grandfather having sex so I’m blurring all the images that are trying to form in my mind. “And no one knew? What about Meredith?” “We’ll never know,” she says, and I guess that’s true. “But Mrs. Maxwell lives in Montreal.” “Dad went to conferences all over the place. She went too.” I still can’t picture this. “So why’s she telling us now?” “I think she needed us to know, to finally say that she used to be an important part of his life too. Knowing Dad, he would have insisted that she keep their secret. Not that it matters anymore.” Over my dead body, I hear him say. Then I think about Mom leaving the room like that and it makes sense. Just one more thing Granddad did to make her dislike him even more. If Mom had known about that affair, there would have been a million turkey dinners he would never have been invited to at our house, that’s for sure. Then I think about how I might feel if Dad had an affair and I didn’t know. “Are your feelings hurt?” “Not really.” But she sighs again, and when she looks up at me her face is all wobbly. “Emily,” she says, “life isn’t simple.” If I hadn’t come into the kitchen like that just when they were talking about Cynthia Maxwell’s secret life with Granddad, I don’t think I’d know any of this stuff. So I say, “Brian broke up with me.” I tell her this because I want her to know that I know life isn’t simple. Her face changes and I can see she’s surprised. “When?” “Last week. I can’t believe he’d be that cold-hearted. He has a new girlfriend. She’s French and goes to McGill and I guess she’s in one of his classes.” I can’t hold it in any longer and I start to cry.