It can mean only one tree. Maybe it’s Julia, pulling a prank on him. Julia isn’t interested in computers, though, and hiding a picture inside a picture—she wouldn’t know how to do that. It wasn’t the kind of joke his parents played, either, trying to turn everything into a learning opportunity or a challenge he could write about on his college essays.

He goes downstairs and into the kitchen. Mom is making coffee, tapping her foot as if the coffee maker were delaying her.

“Good morning,” she says. She runs a hand through the mess of his bedhead hair. She’s always trying to fix his hair. He loves her, but he wishes she wouldn’t do that. Sometimes Mom looks at him as though surprised he’s there.

“Hey,” he says, giving her a quick hug and thinking: This is silly. I should tell her about this email. But then, it’s so odd, so strange, that it’s like having a special secret. So he doesn’t, and she says: “I think your sister went out playing that Creaturescape game with Ned.”

“Critterscape,” he says. He gets orange juice from the fridge, pours a large glass.

“Whatever. Do they just walk around the neighborhood?”

“It’s exercise,” he says, not looking at her.

“That’s what her dance class is for. Do you know what’s going on between them?” Mom asks.

It’s like she can’t help herself, Grant thinks. Like if Julia confides in him he will break that confidence just because Mom asks. “I don’t know,” he says.

Mom bites at her lip, unsatisfied.

“I have to go down into the greenbelt,” he says.

“Why?” Mom is always a little suspicious of the greenbelt. Kids go down there into the heavy growth of oaks and cedars and swim in the wide creek and walk the convoluted trails and sometimes smoke weed or drink. He hasn’t done the forbidden activities. But he knows other kids who have.

He realizes then he should have waited until she wasn’t around or had gone upstairs and then just gone to his tree. Now she is interested, in that Mom way.

“Biology class specimens,” he says. He’s a freshman and biology is the bane of his existence.

“In winter?”

“Yes, Mom, in winter, biology still goes on.”

Her phone buzzes with a specific ringtone that indicates Julia is calling. The ringtone’s melody is that of a song Mom wrote about Julia when she was very young and fighting cancer—a neuroblastoma—and Julia hates that it’s a ringtone but doesn’t want to hurt Mom’s feelings. Grant keeps meaning to tell Mom to change it. Mom picks up the phone, stares at the screen.

Her face goes pale. She makes an odd little noise, like a gasp or a cough interrupted.

“Mom?”