"Mom."
Rhea looked between them. "I'll be in the kitchen. Y'all keep your voices like adults or I will mediate like one."
She left them with the couch and the silence and fifteen years of shared history pressing against the walls.
Angela sat only when Jamal nodded at the chair across from him. She clasped her hands in her lap hard enough to blanche the knuckles.
"I never meant for you to find out like that," she said.
"You never meant for me to find out at all."
She flinched. "That's not fair."
"Fair." He tasted the word. "You want to talk about fair. I spent fourteen months overseas thinking my mother and my best friend were the two people I didn't have to worry about. Turns out I should have worried about both of them in the same sentence."
Angela's eyes filled. She did not wipe them. "I was drowning, Jamal. Your father left and took the noise with him — the arguments, yes, but also the ordinary noise of another person in the house. Then you left for basic, then for active duty, and every time you came home you were already halfway gone again in your head. I cooked. I worked. I went to bed in a house that echoed. Daryl started coming by to check on me because you asked him to. Do you remember that? You said, Keep an eye on Mom for me. And he did. He fixed the garbage disposal. He took out the trash when the bag was too heavy. He sat on the porch and talked about nothing. And then talking became—"
"Stop." Jamal's voice cut clean. "I asked him to check on you. I did not ask him to sleep with you."