Milo had been in a bad mood since four o'clock, and he had been enjoying it.

He had a reason: his father had married a woman six weeks ago who was now sitting at his mother's end of the table, and the whole county had a theory about why. He also had a girlfriend with a hand on his sleeve and a dinner he did not want to sit through.

Then Renia poured the water and used the name. She used it the way somebody uses a word they learned from a photograph — kindly, and completely unaware — and Milo heard his mother in the room for the first time in three years.

“Don't,” Odile said, quietly, into his shoulder.

He was already up. The chair went over behind him and he did not look at it.

he said.

His hands were open at his sides and his voice had gone up an octave and he was still talking, and he was enjoying that too.

His father said one word. It did nothing. Milo turned on him with the whole room watching and said the rest of it — the money, the house, the old man, the second one coming through the gate tonight — and he heard himself getting louder and did not stop, because stopping would have meant sitting down.

Kaz said something dry about the street hearing it. Milo told him where to put that too.

Then a sound came from outside: iron moving under somebody who did not know the trick of it. Milo turned. He was still standing, the only one on his feet, and he was not going to be the one who sat down first.

And there was a shape behind the bars in the dark, and it was smaller than he expected, and it was struggling with a gate that Milo had opened with one hand every day of his life.

Something in his chest turned over and he hated it, and he put the hate where it always goes with him, which is his mouth.

he called across the room, loud enough for the doorway, and he felt Odile flinch beside him and did not look at her.