“I do trust you. It’s just that I’m trying to keep you safe.”

He studied her, mingled obstinacy and sympathy in his face. “I don’t think you do what you do to keep me safe.”

“What do you mean?”

He remained quiet for several moments. Her autumn three-wick candle, which smelled of pumpkin pancake, burned sedately on the coffee table.

“I think you put all these rules on me because you want control,” he said.

“No. I do what I do because I love you.”

“Okay, sure, you love me. But that’s not why you’re so strict.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “You got stuck with a kid when you were around my age.”

She blinked at him because, of course, he was correct. Yet the thought of his taking custody of a child at his age was abhorrent. He was a kid himself, in no way prepared to take charge of a child. Her eighteen-year-old self and Dylan’s seventeen-year-old self had little in common. By that point in her life, she’d lived away from home for four years. She’d come out of the womb a small but old and serious person. Her parents had ensured that she grew up quickly from there.

But Dylan, and thank God for this, had been afforded the chance to be young. After Mom had left him in her care, Leah had done her best to give him an elementary school experience free from worries graver than memorizing multiplication tables. As a middle school kid, he’d spent chunks of his weekends immersed in video games. As a high school kid, he had the luxury of playing football and hiding in his room and regarding the adults in his life as hopelessly uncool.

“I did not get stuck with you,” she said.

“Yeah you did. You were supposed to go and get your PhD, and it makes me feel like dirt when I think about how you had to take care of me and couldn’t go.”

She stepped to him and held his face in her hands. The soft little boy face had turned firm and angular. But this was still her Dylan. “You’re my favorite person. Please believe me when I tell you that having the chance to take care of you has been the greatest joy of my whole life. Would Princeton have been nice?” A rueful chuckle spilled from her. “Yes. But if I had the choice to make all over again, I would choose you every single time. There’s no contest, Dylan. I got the better bargain.”

He stepped back a few feet, looked toward the TV.