The second winter after the fan challenge was the hardest Denise had known since Ray left. The diner cut her hours. The landlord raised the rent by forty dollars, which was not a large number until you lived inside it. Noah grew out of his jeans and into a silence that worried her more than any report card. She found him one January night swinging Cameron's bat in the laundromat hallway at nearly midnight, breath fogging faintly near the stairwell window, counting under his breath — one, two, load, wait — as if the ritual could heat the building.
"Baby," she said gently, "come upstairs. Your hands are going to crack."
"Five more," Noah said.
She let him have five more. Then she made cocoa from a packet and they sat on the couch with the thin blanket that always smelled faintly of dryer sheets. Denise told him, for the first time in detail, about the week Ray left: the half-packed suitcase, the apology that sounded rehearsed, the way Noah at six had asked if Daddy was going to a longer work trip and she had said yes because she could not yet bear to invent a better lie.
"I should have told you straighter," she said.
"You told me enough," Noah answered. "I figured out the rest by watching."
Denise looked at the bat leaning against the wall. "That man — Cameron — he doesn't owe us anything."