"Come to my place. Guest room's clean. I'll make coffee. You don't have to talk until you're ready, but you will eat something that isn't gas-station sadness."
Jamal almost smiled. Almost. "Yes, ma'am."
He drove to Rhea's bungalow on the older side of town, where the trees were taller and the sidewalks cracked in patterns he still recognized from childhood bike routes. Rhea met him at the door in a blue housedress, gray at the temples, eyes already wet and furious on his behalf. She hugged him hard enough to rearrange the air in his lungs. She did not ask for details in the doorway. She took the duffel, set it in the guest room, and poured coffee into a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST AUNT because she refused, she always said, to participate in exaggeration.
They sat at her kitchen table while the light outside drained from gold to gray. Jamal told her everything in the clipped report style he used when emotion threatened to make language useless: arrival, dialogue, towel, seven months, exit. Rhea listened without interrupting. When he finished, she wrapped both hands around her own mug and stared into it as if the coffee might offer counsel.
"I knew she was lonely," Rhea said finally. "After your daddy left, and then after you enlisted, that house got too quiet for her. I told her to join the church singles group. I told her to take that pottery class downtown. I did not tell her to—" She stopped. Shook her head. "Daryl. Of all people. That boy ate at your Thanksgiving table since he was fourteen."
"I know."
"Does he still have that apartment over by the gym?"
"Last I knew."
Rhea's jaw set. "You want me to call your mother?"
"Not yet."