“You really don’t have to help Grant with homework,” Mom says.

“It’s a good distraction.” He’s bad at keeping a steady gaze; Peter looks down at his scuffed-up shoes. “They talked about getting married, you know,” Peter says.

A heavy silence falls on Grant and his mother.

“That just makes it all so much worse,” Grant finally says. His mother shoots him a glance, and Grant knows he’s said something he shouldn’t have.

Peter just nods. “Ned and I won’t be stepbrothers now. It would have been nice to have a brother.”

“You and Ned will always be close.”

“Will we?” Peter asks with a shrug, and Grant can see the answer is no, probably not. Their lives will spin off in different directions now.

Peter says, “We should get to work, Grant. I don’t want to be away from my dad too long, in case he needs me.”

Grant leads him up to his room and sits on the edge of the bed, gesturing at the chair in front of his computer desk, where Peter sits. He doesn’t seem like a kid as much as an adult who emerged a little too early from the cocoon.

Grant has been thinking about what to say. He doesn’t want Peter to see the email message from the Sender that mentions Dad. So he just shows Peter the first email he received, spoofed from his friend Drew’s account, the stock photo of the woman in the rain, and the message about lies.

Peter says nothing, looks at it all.

“I want to find out who sent this to me.”

“I can only tell you where it may have come from.”

“This person—I call him or her the Sender—has to know things about my life,” Grant says. “That Drew is my friend. That J. J. Watt is one of my favorite football players. That I have a tree where I used to hide stuff. Who could know that?”

“Are you on social media?” Peter asks.

Grant nods.

“OK, is Drew one of your friends on Cheeper or Nowpic or Faceplace?”

Grant nods again. He can see where this is going.

“You belong to a fan page for the Texans?”

Grant nods again, his stomach sinking.

“The tree—I don’t know about how someone might find that out. Did you ever talk a lot about it?”

“No. Julia might have told someone. Or my parents. But it’s not like it was some big thing in my childhood. Just a thing I did.”

“Did you ever write about it?”

“Like a school paper?”

“Sure.”

“No.”

“Did your mom? In one of her songs?”