August 9, Sunday
LILY AND Josh appeared on the screen side by side, wedged onto the same side of the kitchen bar. They did not look happy.
"Hey, guys. Tell me about your first week of classes."
Lily didn't look up from a thread she was pulling on her sleeve. "Fine."
"Josh?"
He shrugged. "Dad's been late every day."
"Thursday he didn't show up at all," Lily said, finally looking at the camera. "We had to call Mrs. Patterson to take us."
"He forgot the early dismissal thing on Friday, too," Josh added. "We stood outside for forty minutes."
"I'll talk to him," I said, filing this away with the small, tired resignation of a woman adding one more item to a list that never got shorter. "Also, the last time I checked, school buses were still coming through our neighborhood."
The reaction was instantaneous and identically horrified.
"Mom." Lily's voice dropped an octave, as though I'd suggested something obscene. "The bus is for kids whose parents don't care."
"That's not remotely—"
"It's for, like, the kids who live in apartments," Josh said, with the casual cruelty of a fourteen-year-old repeating something he hadn't examined too closely.
I was speechless and saddened by how much I'd let down my kids by not teaching them humility and gratitude.
"I'm riding with Scott from now on," Lily announced.
I let that go, filing it under battles for another day, and turned to Josh instead. "How's everything else? How's Tucker doing with the new schedule?"
"Fine, I guess." He picked at the edge of the counter. "Mrs. Patterson asked if you left."
My stomach bounced. "Left?"
"Like, left us. She was being weird about it."
Before I could stop myself, I glanced toward the door where Deputy Wells stood with his usual professional stillness.
"Josh, did you tell her anything about where I am? About the trial?"
"No. You said not to tell anyone." He said it with the wounded dignity of a kid who'd actually followed instructions for once and wanted credit.
"Good. That's good, honey. What did you tell her?"
He shrugged again. "That you were away on a long vacation."
I closed my eyes briefly. A vacation. Somewhere in the cul-de-sac, Meg White was almost certainly logging this information for later distribution, filing it neatly beside my divorce and Warren's early-morning gym habit.
By Tuesday half of Alpharetta would have me sunning myself on a beach somewhere while my children fended for themselves, and there wasn't a single thing I could do to correct the record.
Deputy Wells caught my eye and gave the smallest tilt of his head toward the clock.
"I'm almost out of time," I told them. "Take care of Tucker. Look out for each other, okay? I love you both."
Lily reached forward and the screen went dark before the sentence had fully landed, no goodbye, just the abrupt absence where her face had been.
I sat for a moment in the quiet room before Wells escorted me back down the hall.
I told myself this was building something in them—self-sufficiency, resilience, the kind of independence I hadn't exactly modeled for eighteen years.
I told myself the same thing about myself, actually, and mostly believed it.