Wait, what? I see what she’s doing. She’s trying to flip this conversation from her sadness to mine. But you know what, if she wants to do that, I’m going to use it. I reach down (don’t have to reach very far) and pull out the sadness I’ve been feeling all week—about our family, Daddy, this whole situation—and I say, “It would help if I knew what happened.” Tears pool at the base of my throat, and I gently guide them up behind my eyes and let them fall.

“Carli,” Mom says, and picks up the Styrofoam cup from the nightstand. She takes a sip. There’s a Lipton tea tag hanging by a string on the outside of the cup. Mom is bougie about her tea. No way she’s enjoying that Lipton. “You want me to get you some ice chips?” she asks.

“Are you serious? I cry and all you offer me are ice chips?” I sit up in the bed and feel the chill from the cold room hit my bare back through the sparse ties of the hospital gown. “Forget ice chips! I want to know what happened between you and Daddy,” I say, tears gone. Pretending gone. Patience gone.

I swear all fifty-two million times I’ve asked her about why she and Daddy are getting divorced, she acts shady, which is not like her at all. She never shies away from the truth. It’s one of my favorite things about her. My whole life, I’ve always been able to ask her about anything. And I mean anything—sex, drama at school, drugs, alcohol, religion, masturbation. Yes, masturbation! But she can’t talk about what happened between her and Daddy? Makes no freaking sense.

“You’ll have to ask your dad, Carli.”

“Seriously?” It’s so irritating the way she keeps suggesting this like it’s possible. I mean, I can ask Daddy about impersonal stuff, like how to craft the best arguments for my teachers to give me extra credit for all the random things I read. Or what I should use to get all my hair out of the drain. Or why we don’t have one-person-one-vote if we live in a democracy.

But whenever I try to talk to Daddy about life outside the very practical or intellectual—basically anything dealing with feelings—he always gets that look in his eyes, that look that makes me stop pressing. After twenty years together, she might be immune to the look, but I’m not.

“Well, I can’t talk about it, Carli. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

“You’re the one always talking about questioning everything! And now I’m asking something that you have all the answers to, but you refuse to give them to me?”