‘What?’ she says to him. ‘How are you here?’

‘Huh?’ he says. He looks just the same as he did. Not a mark on him. Even in her confusion, Jen is curious. Same navy-blue eyes. Same tousled hair. Same tall, slim frame. But he’s committed an unforgivable act. Unforgivable to everyone, except maybe her. But how is he here? How is he home?

‘What’re you talking about?’ he says. ‘This is weird, even for you. A Jen out of ten.’

Jen sidesteps the inside joke. Not today. ‘Did Dad get you? Are you on bail?’

‘On bail?’ He raises a disdainful eyebrow. It’s a new mannerism of his, emerged since he started dating Clio. Jen wonders if it belongs to her. ‘I’m about to meet Rory.’

‘What?’ Jen says in barely a whisper.

For the past few months he’s looked different. Slimmer in the body, in the hips, but bloated in the face. The pallor somebody gets who is working too much, eating too many takeaways and drinking no water. None of which she is aware Todd is doing, but who knows? She steps towards him and looks closely at him. ‘How did you get home – and what happened?’

‘Home from where? Look – we’re going for breakfast.’

He regularly goes for breakfast with them, these friends, like he’s in an American sitcom. Jen wonders if it irritates her because it was an avenue never available to her.

‘I …’ Jen says, rubbing at her forehead. ‘What happened last night?’ she says. She looks around her, at the picture window and back at Todd.

He is staring at his phone, at a WhatsApp notification. He swipes on it, then begins typing. After he’s finished, he says, ‘I played Call of Duty,’ as though she is a customer who will merely wait to be addressed. She feels a flare of temper.

‘What?’

‘I – what?’

‘Stop avoiding it,’ she says.

‘Avoiding what?’ Todd says. His expression twists in bemusement, nose wrinkles up just like when he was a baby.

‘Your arrest.’

‘My arrest?’

Jen can tell when her son is lying – she has had practise at that recently, as almost everything he says seems to be a lie – and he is definitely not lying at the moment. He looks at her with his clear twilight eyes, a question mark inscribed across his features.

‘You were outside,’ Jen says. She gestures to the mid-landing window. And that’s the moment she realizes what the matter is with the scene. It isn’t the driveway: it’s the window itself. No pumpkin. It’s gone.

Todd blinks at her slowly like an animal. He has two tiny scars left over from the worst of his teenage acne. Otherwise, his face is still childlike, pristine in that beautiful peach-fuzz way of the young.

‘You were outside,’ she says again, tearing her eyes away from the pumpkin-less windowsill that fires anxiety right down her body.

‘When?’ he says softly.

‘I was waiting up for you,’ she says, and for once he doesn’t roll his eyes. Gone is the teenage attitude of recent times. He must be concerned about her to feel so in control of this conversation. His gaze holds hers.