At least, now it’s summer, and the day camp she forces Harvey to attend is a much easier situation. The camp is at the small children’s museum downtown and is run by a teacher in the elementary school, the man all the kids want for second grade, because he wears purple high-top sneakers and dances on his desk when all the children get one hundred on the spelling test. He seems like a nice guy, too, but Shelley’s job has taught her to question everyone. “We talk about dinosaurs, pirates,” he had said, trying to assure her. “Mummies. What children aren’t interested in those topics?” Two days in a row, Harvey has done all of his clinging and begging in the car and then walked off without looking back once, and even though she feels so proud of him, it also breaks her heart, because she fears there could be a day when he or Jason might do that for good. People do that, she thinks yet again. People sometimes leave and you don’t know why, or if they will ever come back; you don’t know if they are alive or dead.

She misses Jason and the way he has always been such a help with Harvey, but she is also thrilled, finally, to get cheerful messages or texts from him. He is doing fine. He loves school. Loves numbers. Calculus. Coding. She’d told him that he didn’t have her brain, and he’d immediately said his skills must come from his dad, something he always circles back to.

“Thanks, Mom,” Jason has said. If he has thanked her once, he has done so thousands of times by now. “I know it’s a lot of money.” All through his life, he has thanked her, and there is some part of her that breaks every time; she knows he felt slightly on the outside when Brent was in their lives. Before that, it had been just the two of them, with Harvey on the way, and making ends meet was really hard then. He loved, as all children do, to hear stories about himself, and so she told him how he had once refused to play with a child who’d intentionally killed a granddaddy longlegs, or how he only ate orange food for a couple of years—goldfish, cantaloupe, Kraft macaroni and cheese—how there was a period of time when he cried to see the sun set, fearful it would not come back.