“I’m not.” Jonah drops his head between his knees and says, “I’m just explaining that I didn’t know her as a kid, and she didn’t know me then, either. She never saw me that way.” He rubs his hands against his face. “She only got to know me as I am now. As a man.”

I exhale a bitter sigh of mock amusement. “When you bonded over Lolita?”

He lifts his head slowly, locking eyes, calm and cool. “I said Bulgakov, not Nabokov.”

I ought to cut out my boy’s tongue.

“We just talked at first.” He sounds sorry but not contrite, almost like he feels sorry for me. “We had a connection.”

She laughed at his jokes and brought him ice cream. These aren’t acts of lovers. But she also went out of her way to embrace his world. She befriended and pampered his best friend. This sort of thing, I’ll concede, is symptomatic of romantic love.

“She freaked out after the first time and made me promise to forget about it. I tried hard. We couldn’t help it, though. We really care about each other, and what we had was different from what you two have. I’m not saying it’s better. It’s just different. We tried to be sensitive about keeping things separate, too. That’s why we chose the roof, designated it just for that. But Nick’s death ruined everything. Now she won’t even look at me.”

He gnaws a fingernail, takes a breather and continues: “The night before Nick died, Elizabeth heard him trying to sneak up there in the middle of the night. She said she couldn’t sleep because you two had a fight. You slept downstairs that night, right? Whatever. The point is, she heard someone trying to get to the roof and assumed it was me. She texted me in the middle of the night and told me what happened, said we needed to talk. She was worried we were getting too close to getting caught, but Nick was oblivious at that point. Believe me. He was too much in his head about something.”

“About what?” I ask.

“Doesn’t matter. But the next morning, after you shouted up about going to the gym, I texted Elizabeth and told her to meet me on the roof when she woke up, and I went up there and waited. That’s why the door was unlocked. And I guess Nick was outside already for some reason, and so he saw me appear up there, which is why he knew it was unlocked. The next thing I know, he’s up there with me, and I’m freaking out, worried that Elizabeth will come up and everything will go to shit.