“Would you have stopped them?” Lauren asked. She looked at Derek as if the question were a test she already knew she had failed.
“I would have wanted to,” he said. “I don’t know what I would have done. You didn’t give me the chance to find out. You decided I was an obstacle and then you got to be sad that I was behaving like one.”
She took it. He watched her take it. It did not satisfy him. Satisfaction was going to be a long time coming, if it came at all.
Mason stirred on the couch. All three of them went still, a family already, in the worst and most ordinary way: people organized around a sleeping child. He did not wake. His hand stayed on the strap.
Derek stood and filled the kettle, because he needed a sound that was not a voice. While it heated he looked at the calendar on the refrigerator. Mason’s school picture was held up by a magnet from a hardware store. The picture was from September. In it the boy wore a polo shirt Derek had ironed and a smile he had negotiated. Under the magnet, half-covered, was a permission slip for a field trip to the aviary and a reminder in Lauren’s handwriting about a dentist. Ordinary artifacts. They did not know they were from the last day of a certain kind of life.
“I want to hear it from you,” he said to Lauren. “Not the plan. The beginning. How old. Who he was. What you signed. What you told yourself every year when we drove down there and I carried pies into that house. You don’t have to tell it in front of him if you’d rather not.”