I wished she’d stop saying that she knew. She had short-circuited my brain a little bit. I was prepared to reveal this secret, ask for her forgiveness for not telling her, and then try to protect her from the fallout. And instead, she was sitting there on her sofa, waiting for me to catch up.

“We had a Xerox machine in our garage, sweetie,” she said, softly, like I was six years old.

“But it was broken,” I told her. “The triplets broke it.”

“I know, which is why I didn’t quite realize it at first. But once it got really bad, I would check the boxes of copy paper and it was always less than before.”

“I didn’t know if you remembered that we had that copier,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me before? Why didn’t you tell me that summer, after people died? Why didn’t you make me stop?”

“Well, it did take me a while to figure it out, because you had confused me by liking a boy for the first time in your entire damn life, and then, crazy things had already happened, that boy fell off the water tower. And why in the world would I want to make you feel bad about that? You never mentioned it, and so I didn’t, either.”

“The whole time you’ve known,” I said.

“And, sweetie, maybe I would have said something if you’d messed up your life. If you’d never been able to recover from that summer, I would have told you that it wasn’t your fault, any of it, and that it was beautiful, I think, what you and Zeke made. But you got married, and you had Junie, and you’re a published author, and you’re a success. So I didn’t need to say anything. And you didn’t say anything, so I hoped that you’d forgotten about it, or put it behind you.”

“I did not put it behind me, though,” I admitted, and then I started crying. “I think about it every day. I say it every day, three or four times a day.”

“Well, you’re still alive. You made it. It’s okay,” my mom said, and now she was crying.

“Did Hobart know?” I asked. It suddenly seemed important.

“He had no clue, sweetie,” she said. “You think Hobart, god rest his beautiful soul, would have figured it out? My god, no. Just me.”

“And it’s okay?” I asked.

“What’s okay?” she replied.

“If I tell people now. Well, I mean this lady is going to tell people, and it’s going to come out. I want to know that it’s okay with you. You’re still here in Coalfield. I worry people might hate you.”