You pressed your hand against the dresser to steady yourself. Hearing it from Daniel had been one thing. Hearing it from Michael turned the knife.
“A year,” you said.
“Mom, it’s complicated.”
“It better be the most complicated thing in the history of human betrayal.”
“Please keep your voice down.”
You gave a broken laugh. “You’re worried about my tone?”
The silence on the line changed. Not empty now. Frightened.
Then he asked, in a voice that had gone thin and strange, “Did Daniel tell you?”
And there it was again. Daniel. Casual. Familiar. A name that had been in your mouth last night for entirely different reasons. The shame of it flooded you so fiercely you had to sit back down.
“Yes,” you said. “He told me.”
Michael made a sound you had never heard from him before. Part dread, part calculation.
“Why were you with him?”
You could have lied. God knows the universe had provided enough of them already. You could have said he came by. You could have said he stopped to talk. You could have spared yourself that final layer of humiliation.
Instead, perhaps because honesty was the only clean thing left in the room, you said, “Because I met him last night. And I brought him home.”
The silence that followed felt like falling down an elevator shaft.
When Michael finally spoke, his voice was barely recognizable. “What?”
“You heard me.”
He did not speak for several seconds. You could hear his breathing. Somewhere in the background, one of your grandchildren laughed at something. The sound was so innocent it felt like a crime scene had opened in a nursery.
