This time it wasn’t Collette crying or Willow and Lucas fighting. As I stepped out of my pants, I heard the front door shut and the slap of Ryan’s sneakers against the hardwood stairs. They grew louder as he rushed past Willow’s room, and a few moments later a door slammed shut. The sound of water running, the telltale complaint of air in the pipes. He was in his bathroom.

Something was wrong. And he had never called me back after my message about Willow, which was a huge red flag. That was his little sister, the one he would go to the ends of the earth to protect. I hesitated in the doorway, dueling between ignoring it and enjoying my bath, or finding out what was going on with my eldest son. Parental duty won once again, damn it.

Stepping into a crumpled pair of sweatpants, I tiptoed upstairs to his bathroom door and tapped on it with one knuckle.

“You okay, sweetie?” I spoke to the white compressed wood.

“I’m fine, Mom.” Ryan sounded short and annoyed, which irritated me to no end. Why did the kids instantly go on the defense with me at a simple question? I was sure they saved these voices just for me, because I never heard it toward their father or their friends.

The sink water was still running a couple minutes later, and I wondered what he could possibly be doing in there.

“When you’re finished, I need to speak with you. It’s important.”

“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

“No, it can’t wait. I left you a message about your sister, to which you never replied. Then you were out all night, with no phone call, no text, then you breeze in here and say you don’t have two minutes to give your mother? Until you start paying rent, I own you, kid. So open the door.”

“Please, Mom. I don’t want you to see me right now.”

What the hell did that mean? “Get decent because I’m coming in.”

I rattled the doorknob as Ryan yelped, “Okay, Mom! Stop—I’m opening the door!”

As the door swung open, Ryan shuffled back a few steps, his hand shielding his face. I tugged his arm down and examined him. A growing purple and yellow bruise blossomed under his eye socket.

“What happened? Who did this to you?”

My fingertips gently probed his face as he winced and jerked away from my touch.

“Nobody. I got hit with the ball during baseball practice.”

Liar, liar, lips on fire. I could smell a lie a mile away. I’d been a teenager before, a deviant one at that, and I knew how to spot ’em.

“Don’t bullshit me, Ry. Who hit you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. You’ll flip out.”

“Does this have something to do with Geoffrey Faust—and Willow going to see him today?”