“My appointment is tomorrow,” Aiko says, turning to leave. “First thing.”

I check the screen and answer right away. “Mom, hey.”

“Hey! You said you needed to speak with me urgently. Is everything okay?”

“Yes, it’s quite urgent. If you ever checked your messages, you’d know when your son needs you. Noah told you to call?”

“When would I have talked to Noah?” she hedges.

“Okay. Never mind. I’ll deal with that later. I have a question for you.”

“All right.” Even though she says it, I hear the caution in her voice.

“Did you ever visit the Allens’ lake house?”

The question drops into a pool of silence so deep I almost lose track of it.

“Mom? Did you hear—”

“I heard you. I…why would you ask me that?” Caution becomes evasion.

“I don’t remember us ever going with them up there. Kimba’s grandfather bought it not too long before we left.”

“Yes, so why would you—”

“Your charm was there, Mom,” I cut in before she can find a way to lie to me without telling me anything at all. “The star of David you lost that summer? Kimba and I went to the lake house and she found it in the laundry room.”

“What laundry room?” she asks and then gasps.

“Yeah,” I say, drawing out the word. “They just completed renovations that knocked out some walls and shuffled some things. The laundry room wouldn’t have been there…when you were.”

She releases a long, tired sigh on the other end of the line.

“Nothing’s ever as it seems, Ezra,” she says, her words weary and cryptic.

“I’m not interested in how things seem. I’m interested in how they were. How they are.”

“Your father and I were having problems,” she says, her voice shrinking. “I wanted to leave Atlanta—needed my family around me.”

“I remember.”

“And you know how badly I wanted to get you out of the South. Your father and I both wanted to expose you to broader experiences. Even I didn’t dream of going overseas, but it turned out to be good for you, didn’t it?”

“Yes, it was great for me, besides the fact that it meant I lost Kimba.”

“Yes, I’m sorry for that now. At the time, it seemed like the best thing to do.”

“What was the best thing to do? Move? Why? What happened?” I pause and then ask the question again, the one she denied before. “Were you unfaithful to Dad?”

I can practically hear her courage gathering and taking shape before she says the word.

“Yes.”

I nod and expel a sigh. Finally, the truth. “I don’t condemn you, Mom.”

“Good. Because you have no right to,” she says, defiance coming across clearly.

“Of course not. I just meant I would never judge. Can you tell me what happened?”