Lauren turned around. Her face was blotched and plain. “I booked the flight because Claire said Daddy can’t be alone at night anymore and Jonah wouldn’t stay here as a guest of my cowardice. I thought if I took him home and stood in that kitchen and said it to my father with Mason in the house, I would finally be a person who had said it, and then I could come back and say it to you. I see how it sounds. I saw how it sounded this morning when he—” she looked at the couch, at the sleeping boy, and dropped her voice “—when he wouldn’t get out of the car. I am not asking you to find it reasonable. I am telling you it was the plan of a woman who has been hiding a son in the word brother for so long she thought sequence was the same thing as courage.”
Derek was quiet. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere outside a neighbor’s dog announced a squirrel with professional commitment. He thought of Ruth in the fellowship-hall kitchen. You are allowed. He thought of the boat wallpaper and the narrow bed and the photograph in the hall of three children he had been told was Lauren, Claire, and a cousin who had been visiting. He had not asked the cousin’s name. He could see the photograph now, clearly, a boy of about ten squinting, and he understood that his incuriosity had been a form of participation.
“The return ticket,” he said. “Two seats. You and Mason.”
“Yes.”
“You were never going to bring him back here.”
Jonah answered before she could. “I wasn’t going to be imported. I have a job down there if I ask for it. I have a grandfather who still calls me son and isn’t entirely wrong to. I didn’t come here to blow up a kid’s life and move into his room. I came here because I wanted one person to stop making me a rumor. The one-way was fine. The part where you found out from a piece of paper at a curb was not fine. I told her that yesterday. She said you would try to stop us from going if you knew, and Mason needed to meet my— to meet Howard as Howard, and it was only two days. She had an answer for every hour except the hour we were in.”