I can tell you that much! It didn’t help things at all … (Beat.) Eric and I were walking in the mall … this was on a weekend, I remember it like it was yesterday. I was only probably five months in at this time, just starting to show now and … you know … I was glowing at this point. Everybody said so. It was months since I’d last seen or been around Tommy—summer was on us and we were enjoying a few days of quiet time, Eric and I. School was done, Tommy had graduated and was now poised to begin college at a school downstate … many hundreds of miles away … he had come by my office one afternoon, very late in the semester, and he just popped his head in through the door, as he was known to do—and he pledged his love to me. Said that he understood our “situation” and that he’d take it like a “man” but that he’s always gonna “love” me. Just like that. Said “I love you … and I’m always gonna.” And I was … God, some part of me wanted to just run over to him … throw my arms around him and … and … but the rest of me, the very practical part of me … hoped that no one in the office over from mine had heard him … that is what I was thinking as he’s standing there, smiling at me … and I was smiling back. Frozen. Terrified now … that everything I’d done … so carefully … might backfire … right at the very last moment … (Beat.) But it didn’t … it did not … (Beat.) Anyhow! The mall! Eric and I were walking down past Penney’s, on our way out to the car, his arm around me—I hadn’t seen him this happy about anything, the way he was about this baby in so long … for … so many years … and suddenly … I hear a voice from behind me. “Mrs. Johnson?” And we both turn, Eric and I … and there is Tommy, holding hands with some girl whom I vaguely recognize as a Freshman or a Sophomore or something from our school, with this look in his eyes. Smiling at me. At both of us. Me and Eric. I instinctively cover myself with the shopping bags in my hands as I do my best to meet his eye, quickly introducing him as one of my students as we share some small talk … Tommy’s already moved down to school but just up for a cousin’s birthday and seeing friends, going to take a load of his things down to his dorm after that—Eric stands there and talks to the boy, smiling and giving him tips on college … no idea in the world that I am paying for all of this … what I haven’t been able to cover through grants or stipends or a work-study job … the rest is coming from me and will for the next four years … more lies as I sign over checks or steal away cash from our shared accounts … all the ways in which I’ve promised to help Tommy … and in this moment Tommy knows that we share something here that no one else knows about … not one other person … and I can feel him puff up with the pleasure of that … that power … staring right into Eric’s eyes … smiling at him. (Beat.) He never introduces us to the girl … she hangs back a bit, looking at things on her phone … as Tommy goes on and on, telling Eric how “great” his wife is and what a “lifesaver” she’s been … helping a “young man like me” get to college and out of his terrible family situation … all of it.