I knocked.
Not because I was brave. Because the toy was still on the nightstand and my body had spent the whole day clenched around the memory of it in his hand. Dinner had been ordinary. I had said Daddy at the table and he had passed the salt. The door to my room had stayed open. I had not touched myself. By ten the house was quiet and the quiet was worse than the motor.
His door was shut. I stood in the hall in the same T-shirt and nothing under it and hated the sound my knuckles made.
“Come in.”
Cole was sitting on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his knees, like he had been waiting and refusing to look like it. Lamp on. Shirt still buttoned. The spare-room toy was not in here. This room smelled like him. Soap. Wood.
I closed his door. Then I opened it again an inch because
