Every choice I’ve ever made was to shield him from the losses prepared for me as a child. I rose up so he wouldn’t have to. Could it be that everything I’ve ever done—the hard work and the love, the steps forward, the backlash, all of the bitter ends and bright ideas—has been wasted? I fell for the fallacy that serenity is a meritocracy, but there is no credit earned or redeemed. I strained for this. I bent my trajectory and changed my tongue for this, and traded up for this, but nothing rolls over. Every day begins anew underwater. Every day I work my way to the surface, and every night I sink all over again. I’ve turned amphibian. I’m the Leviathan caught between Scylla and Charybdis.

That’s fatherhood for you, he said. Turns the best of us into monsters.

The answer is no. No, I cannot ask him to lie for me. I cannot ask him to soil his respect for me. I will fall on the sword for him, and I will tell the investigator everything. I’ll come clean, the ink will dry on Nick’s death certificate, and we’ll find a way to get on with our lives.

I roll onto my side, slipping my hands beneath a pillow, tucking into the fetal position—the shared pose of each raw human, bound and protected by our mothers’ fluid and flesh, oblivious to more: we were all this, once—but I’m ripped from the moment by the unremarkable discovery of evidence that my kid is a slob. He’s the sort of slob who leaves trash in his bed. My fingers guess before my mind does: a candy wrapper, an Alka-Seltzer package.

But no. It’s a condom wrapper. My son left an empty condom wrapper under the pillow on which he sleeps. He hasn’t changed his sheets in weeks.

I blink. I blink to change the channel in my head and blink again, progressing pictures in a carousel slide show rotating in my mind. Images and possibilities exchange for the next and the next and the next as I scan back through the progression of their friendship. The desire to please. The need to include Nick in our lives. I think of the silent messages they exchanged on the boat, threading hooks. They sensed each other the way only lovers can and do, and all this time, I missed the signs because I was fixated on a red herring.

Elizabeth wasn’t sleeping with Nick. Jonah was.