The grocery store. The nail salon and yoga studio. Yesterday at Starbucks, he passed me a stevia packet before I could ask for one, which makes me wonder how many times he’s seen me there, stirring sweetener into my coconut latte.

Cam’s deep voice booms through the car speakers. “I’m in the middle of something. Can I call you in thirty?”

My husband always answers, even when he’s busy. Especially then. This is our steadfast rule ever since our oldest, Beatrix, took a spill on the playground when she was four, knocking herself out and breaking her arm in three places. Cam was in the middle of a renovation at the Inman Park restaurant at the time, covered in construction dust and arguing with contractors whose every other word was over. Overdue, overworked, over budget. Thirty times I called him that day, frantic and bouncing in the back of an ambulance while comforting a scared child and trying to keep a fussy toddler on my lap. Cam didn’t feel his phone buzzing in his back pocket, didn’t notice the screen lighting up with a long line of increasingly desperate messages from me.

The last one I left as they were wheeling Beatrix into Children’s Healthcare.

“Your daughter is in the hospital, Cam. Maybe pick up your phone and call us sometime.”

Mean and petty, I know, but I’ve never been so furious. Or so stressed. Or so downright petrified.

Beatrix was fine. Cam and I, however, lost five years of our lives that day.

Now I say to Cam, “He’s here.”

“Who’s where?”

“That guy. The skeevy one I told you about, with the glasses and the comb-over man bun. He’s here at Westmore.”

“Well, maybe he has a musically gifted kid.”

I roll my eyes, lift my hands from the steering wheel. “Right. And he just happens to go to the same gym as me and shops in the canned goods aisle at Whole Foods whenever I walk through their door.”

In the back seat, Baxter leans as far forward as his booster seat will allow. “Hi, Daddy!”

“Hey, buddy. You keeping your mom company?”

Except for his fine mousy waves, our son is a spitting image of Cam. Baxter gives an enthusiastic nod. “She took me to Bruster’s, and then she made me get the frozen banana.”

And he’s still salty about it, too, no matter how many times I explain that food coloring is bad for his six-year-old body, and the scoop of Purple Dinosaur he’s constantly begging for is more dye than ice cream. The banana dipped in dark chocolate is our hard-won compromise.

I twist around on my seat and hold a finger to my lips, my next words for Cam: “Of course he doesn’t have a musically gifted kid. I’m telling you, Cam. This guy is following me. He is.”