I didn't stay in the kitchen. I'm not proud of that either. I said, "I need a minute," in a voice that didn't sound like mine, and I went out through the garage, past the recycling and the bikes — Juni's bike, the only one left now — and out the side door into the yard, and I stood next to the trampoline in the dark with my arms wrapped around myself. It was cold enough to see my breath. The wind was coming down off the canyon rim and pulling the last of the leaves off the cottonwood, and I could hear them hitting the trampoline mat one at a time with a tiny dry tick, like somebody tapping on a window with a fingernail.
I thought about the legal pad. I thought about doing the math four times in March and having it come out the same. I thought that I had been so careful about the numbers — the carbs, the insulin units, the sensor costs, the night differential, three-forty an hour times thirty-six hours times fifty-two weeks — and that there had been a number I'd never written down anywhere, which was the number of hours of sleep a fifteen-year-old boy loses when he wakes up at two and three and four in the morning, four or five nights a week, for six months, and lies awake afterward with his heart pounding. I tried to work it out, standing in the yard. I couldn't. I kept losing my place.
I thought about all the mornings I'd come home and found him on the couch with the phone on his chest. I thought about standing over him and looking down and thinking about Kip. And I thought — this is the worst part, and I'll say it and then I won't say it again — that if I'd ever once just turned the phone over and looked at the screen, instead of looking at him, I'd have seen her number there. I'd have seen him lying on my couch with my daughter's blood sugar on his chest like a heartbeat monitor. I'd been so afraid of being the kind of mother who snoops that I'd become the kind who doesn't look.
When I came back in, the kitchen light was still on. The tacos were still on the table, and the pink box was still between his plate and his water glass, and neither of them had moved it. Juni was sitting in her chair eating a taco, slowly, with her eyes on her phone — counting, I realized, because she'd bolused for grapes and had to eat. Kellan was standing at the counter with his back to me and his thumb pressed against the bottom of his old phone, waiting for the screen to come back.
"Leave it," I said.
He turned around.
"Leave it. Go to bed."
"It's eight-thirty."
"I don't care. Go to bed. I'm off tonight. I've got her."
He looked at me a long moment. Then he looked at the phone in his hand.
"Your alarm's at fifty-five," he said. "I saw it once on your phone. That's too low. She drops fast after fifty-five. Sometimes it's like ten points in five minutes."
"Then I'll change it."