"Was," Jamal said. He looked at Daryl one more time, at the towel, at the gold chain, at the body he had spotted in the weight room a thousand times without ever imagining it in his mother's hallway. "You can keep the dinner."
He walked out. The door did not slam. He closed it with a precision that felt like the last clean thing he could do.
The rental car smelled of whatever chemical companies used to convince travelers that temporary spaces could be trusted. Jamal sat behind the wheel in the driveway for a full minute and stared at the house he had grown up in. The lawn was neat. The porch light was off because it was still day. The mailbox still said HAYES in peeling vinyl letters his father had put up fifteen years ago, before the divorce, before the quiet years, before Angela learned how to fill a house with one person's footsteps and call it enough.
He drove without a destination until the suburban streets gave way to the strip of chain restaurants and big-box stores that marked the edge of town. He parked in a grocery lot and called the one person who was not his mother and not Daryl and not a battle buddy who would ask the wrong questions with the right intentions.
Aunt Rhea answered on the second ring. "Please tell me you're calling from a plane and not from trouble."
"I'm home," Jamal said. His throat closed around the next sentence. He forced it out anyway. "I walked in on Mom. With Daryl."
Silence on the line. Then Rhea's voice, low and careful: "With Daryl how."
"Towel. Hallway. He called her baby and asked if dinner was ready."
"Lord have mercy." Rhea exhaled as if she had been holding that breath for years. "Where are you right now?"
"Grocery parking lot. I can't go back there."