He was giving me a choice: to help or not. I’d been so eager to support Jonah on my terms. Book club, Proust. But this was gravely different. This was my chance to do something big and daring and meaningful for him, a gesture wide enough to swallow all the ways I’d done him wrong, even if—no, especially because it gave me no pleasure. This was my test, my one true opportunity to heal the broken thing. It wasn’t about favor. I could have let Jonah hate me, if he’d had anyone else to turn to, but he had no one. He’d lost his best friend. He was so alone in the world, and so I said, Leave it to me.

I started giving orders. Jonah helped me clean the house, the roof, the stairs. We checked and double-checked the warped flooring for sneaker scuffs. I couldn’t bring myself to inspect Nick’s body for signs of a struggle, and for days afterward, I agonized, thinking, Maybe Jonah was wrong? He swore up and down he hardly touched Nick, but, What if I could have saved him? And, What if Jonah’s fingerprints are bruised onto Nick’s skin?

The autopsy showed death on impact, by the way. There’s nothing we could have done.

Yes, of course I wanted to call the police. Of course I wanted to call Robert, to tell him everything and ask for help, but in allowing for a pause, I’d let the whole thing turn watery. Jonah was begging me, begging, to let Robert hear the truth from him, his own son. Jonah wanted to handle it like a man, he said, which apparently meant facing Robert alone. Maybe this is simple, but I kept thinking, Jonah knew him first. I kept telling myself that I had to honor their relationship by letting Jonah choose how he would reveal this most wretched truth. In the end, I decided Jonah had the right to confess on his own terms, so I tricked Robert into running errands, which bought us time to hit reset—and while we reset, Jonah told me about Kayla, and all the things she used to want, and how Kayla’s favorite person in the world was her grandmother, and how her grandmother had given Kayla an around-the-world ticket as a high school graduation present. She’d planned to leave for Bangkok the following week. I chose to focus on this: Kayla shopping for dragon fruit at a floating market or dropping coins in bronze bowls at Wat Pho. I pictured her dwarfed by the reclining Buddha’s golden feet, wishing on pearl-tipped toes.