Lauren made a sound that was not a word. She pressed two fingers to her mouth.
Derek looked at her and felt the marriage shift a quarter inch on its foundation, not a collapse, not yet, just the sick tilt of a floor that has been trusting the wrong beam. “What did he say, Mason?”
“I don’t want to say it here.”
“You don’t have to.”
“He said Mom was his mom.” Mason’s face crumpled and he pushed it into the backpack, into the smell of pencil and library book and the crushed crackers Derek had put in the side pocket at dawn. The rest came out muffled and precise, because Mason was always precise when he was breaking. “And then Mom said he heard it wrong too. Everybody hears it wrong. I don’t want to get on the plane. If I get on it, you stay here, and maybe she doesn’t come back, and he goes, and I won’t know the house.”
The concourse kept being a concourse. A child somewhere laughed at a tablet. The speaker announced a delay that had nothing to do with them. Derek put his hand on his son’s back and felt the hitch of his breathing and did not tell him it was fine, because it was not fine, and Mason could hear a lie now the way a bat hears a wire.