"And what was I supposed to tell you? You'd come home at seven and look at me like —" He stopped.
"Like what?"
He looked at the window over the sink, black now, with the three of us reflected in it, small and yellow.
"Like I'm him," he said.
I didn't say anything. I couldn't.
"Every morning," he said. "You'd come in and I'd be on the couch because I couldn't go back to sleep after, my heart would be going too hard, and I'd have the phone on my chest so I could see her number, and you'd stand there and look at me. I wasn't asleep, Mom. Half the time I wasn't asleep. I'd lie there with my eyes shut and I could feel you standing there looking at me, and I knew what you were thinking. I know what you think when you look at me with a phone. I was there too. I used to find him."
"Kel," Juni said softly.
"And when you took it in September," he said, "and I was begging you, I could see it on your face. I could see you thinking that's what he sounded like. And I thought, if I tell her now, she'll think I'm lying. She'll think it's an excuse. She'll think I'm making up something with Juni to get my phone back, because that's what he'd do." He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, fast, one swipe. "So I didn't tell you. I just set the oven timer."
There's a thing that happens when you're told the truth about yourself by somebody you love, all at once, in your own kitchen, with dinner going cold. It isn't like being hit. People say it's like being hit. It's more like when you're on the cold-chain floor and the compressor kicks off, which happens maybe twice a year, and the roar you didn't even know you'd been hearing for eight hours just stops, and in the silence afterward you can hear everything — your own breathing, the scanner beeping three aisles over, somebody's shoes squeaking on the concrete — and you understand how loud it was the whole time, and how you'd stopped noticing.
"The screen," I said. "In August. You didn't drop it in the driveway."
"The stairs," he said. "Going down to get the juice. The bulb was out in the hall. I missed the bottom two."
I'd replaced that bulb myself, sometime in late August. I'd thought, huh, when did that go out.