I thought I’d hidden it.
I thought I’d protected him from all of it — that as far as Nathan knew, we were fine, and his only job was to be sixteen.
That was the first silence in our house. Mine.
I’d been so busy keeping my fear from my son that it never once occurred to me my son might be keeping his from me.
Because somewhere in those two months, Nathan had stopped being a boy who didn’t know, and become a boy who knew everything — and had decided, the way his father would have, that he wasn’t going to just stand there and watch us lose the last place that still had Dan in it.
He’d heard me. One of those nights I thought I’d taken the call in the car, I hadn’t been quiet enough.
And my son had made a decision no sixteen-year-old should ever have to make.
