He turned back to the window.
We didn’t speak again until we pulled into the driveway.
Jess put Oliver to bed while I stood in the kitchen and looked at nothing. I heard her reading to him upstairs — something with dragons — her voice low and steady, the kind of steadiness that takes enormous effort to hold.
I poured two glasses of water and sat at the kitchen table.
When she came back downstairs, her composure had come down. She sat across from me, wrapped both hands around one of the glasses, and looked at me directly.
“He fell asleep fast,” she said. “Which probably means he was exhausted from holding himself together.”
“Yeah.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “Tom. That was not the first time.”
She wasn’t accusing me. Her voice was too tired for that. She was stating a fact the way you state a fact when you’ve been waiting a long time for someone else to finally see it too.
“The summer before last,” she continued. “When she told him his drawings looked like a baby did them. You laughed it off. She said she was kidding.”
“She wasn’t.”
“No,” Jess said. “She wasn’t.”
We sat with that.
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
She looked at me a long time. “I want you to decide that she doesn’t get to be around him. Not until she understands what she did. And I don’t think she’s going to understand it easily.”
“She’ll say we’re overreacting.”
“She’ll say a lot of things,” Jess said. “That’s not our problem.”
I looked at the two glasses of water between us.
“Okay,” I said.
One word. But we both knew what it meant.
Part 3
I called my mother the next morning.