“I asked Nick about the night before, and he said yes, he’d tried going up there. He’d been upset about something and wanted to get away, and he remembered me saying that’s where I’d go to escape in high school, so he tried, but the door was locked. But he was still spazzing, still hard-up for privacy. And I thought his timing was really weird. Like, what in the world was he doing outside at that hour? For him to see me go up, I mean?

“I told him the roof was too dangerous, and tried to convince him to turn around, but he went crazy. He begged me to either leave him alone or be a friend. I couldn’t warn Elizabeth to stay back, because I’d left my phone downstairs, but I figured if she heard Nick talking she’d turn around, so I said, ‘I’m listening.’ ”

I’m listening, too, piecing the time line together and remembering how free I was that morning when I started my engine and drove off to the gym, away from the drama. That memory collapses, felled by a detail I thought I’d dodged. “What was worrying him?” I ask Jonah.

“I didn’t know yet. And I was freaking, so I suggested we get Elizabeth. She’s better at crisis than we are, you know? But he was adamant we not upset her. When I insisted, he snapped. That’s when he told me Elizabeth was pregnant.” Jonah looks at me with the limp hope that I’ll correct him. “As you can imagine, this was pretty shocking for me. I’m not ready to be a dad, you know? I asked Nick to give me a minute, just a minute to think, but that was a bad move, because sitting there silently meant we weren’t making noises to warn Elizabeth, and suddenly, there she is. Things got really weird really fast.”

Rage courses through my body and into my head, compressing into a bullet.

“Nick was so clear, you know? Hyperalert. Hard to explain. Afterward, I kept trying to convince myself that maybe he was like that because he was fucked up or something, but I know in my soul he was stone-cold sober. We were the thing that made him run. It was us. It was our fault, Dad.”

Jonah tells the ceiling, “Elizabeth is the one who looked guilty right away, and she said something to the effect of, ‘It’s not what you think,’ which might as well have been a confession. That’s when Nick checked out our setup and realized there was something to hide. From that point on, it was chaos. I tried to get him to relax, asked if he wanted to take a walk or a Vicodin.”

“Why would you have Vicodin?”

He sounds bored when he says, “You can buy anything at school, Dad. RAs sell them.”

“Great.”