He peeked out from under the pillow, instantly regretting his life choices. All of them. The light burned his retinas and the yelling kept getting louder. “Mom?”

“So you are alive,” she mocked. She was standing at the foot of his bed, hands on her hips, arms akimbo. “What the actual heck is going on here, Jeffy? I knew I should never have agreed to you graduating high school early. You are not ready for college.”

Jeff wanted to cry. “Mom, why are you here?” he whispered. “Can you stop shouting?”

She laughed. “If you think this is shouting . . . We haven’t even started, Jeffy. Sit up. Now.”

Shit. Her soldier voice. She’d left the military twenty years ago, but the intensity of her soldier voice hadn’t diminished. His body tried to comply with her order, but his stomach protested. “Fucking hell, Mom.”

She gasped. “Jeffy! Language.”

“Mom!” he gasped back. “Trash can. Please.”

With an impatient, angry sigh she dumped the contents of his trash can on his desk, then handed him the empty bin. “You deserve to be sick. How could you, Jeff? How could you?”

He blinked, trying to focus through the haze. “Huh? How could I what?”

“Get drunk? Disappear for days without a word?” She shoved her phone in his face and he recoiled, all the letters out of focus. “Write this . . . trash?”

“What?” he asked dumbly. “What is it? ’Cause I can’t see.”

“Serves you right. Your poor father’s turning in his grave. I am so ashamed of you, I could cry.”

“Join the club,” he muttered, but knew it had to be bad. She never brought up his dead father unless it was. His father had died of cancer when Jeff was eight years old, but his mother maintained what was basically a shrine to him in the spare bedroom. “What time is it?”

“One A.M.”

He stared at her. “What? Why are you even awake at one A.M.?”

“Why am I awake? Why do you smell like a brewery?”

“Distillery,” he corrected absently. “What are you talking about?”

“This.” She jabbed her finger at the phone screen. “This piece of trash that is so far beneath you that I . . .” Her voice broke on a genuine sob. “I don’t even know what to say.”

That got his attention. His mom being speechless didn’t happen often. Her crying was even rarer.

He squinted at the phone screen. “Let me see it. Can you maybe . . . I don’t know. Make me some coffee?”

She tossed the phone in his lap, making him wince again. “Shi—oot, Mom. Be careful.”

“Be careful, he says. Make me coffee, he says. I should turn you over my knee, is what I should do,” she grumbled. “You want to be so goddamn independent, get your own coffee.”

He blinked a few times, grateful when her phone screen came into focus. It was his story on Mercy Callahan. “What’s wrong with it?”