“Wow.” Max has never been a great student but the kid is smart as hell. When he was old enough to understand Mommy was a writer, he latched onto reading, working his way quickly past his class level and the level after that. He read A Wrinkle in Time at age eight and The Hobbit at nine. I could never have read Tolkien at nine. He struggles with math and is allergic to tests of any type, but he’ll be devouring Joyce by fifteen. He’s asked to read my books on several occasions, but I always tell him they’re too adult for him right now. A few more years.

“My room is too far away from yours,” he says.

“It’s just one floor away,” I say. “There’re three floors in this house, so that’s not so bad.” I unfold a shirt and place it on the bed.

“I don’t like it here,” he says.

I nod, knowing how he feels. We could fit six or seven of our old apartments in this house, not even counting all the yard space. “I know. It’s a big change. But you’ll get used to it.”

Max looks down, as if the world suddenly got just a little too heavy. I walk up to him.

“Hey,” I say, pulling him in to me. His head fits snug against my chest, and part of me doesn’t want him to grow any more so I can always cradle him just like this. “I know this is hard, but there’s no easy way through this. There are no shortcuts through this kind of pain. It’s not fair, but it’s how it is.”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he goes into this kind of fugue state where his mouth hangs a bit open and his eyes focus on some distant world. It scared me when he first started doing this after Riley’s death, but I realized it was all part of him processing a major shift in his life. It happens to me, too, maybe without the complete withdrawal from the present. But that moment of getting stuck on a reality so profound you lose yourself in it. For Max, his typical de-animation lasts ten, twenty seconds.

Finally, he blinks. Says, “We could have stayed in Milwaukee.”

“No,” I say. “We needed a new environment. And we need help.”

“No, we don’t. We can do everything on our own.”

I shake my head as I squeeze him harder. “No, we can’t. Not yet. That’s the reality of this. Your grandfather’s helping us out, and we need to appreciate that.”

“He could have just sent us the money.”

How do I tell my son that Mommy suffers from debilitating nightmares and my only hope for relief is to face my past head-on, right here in this house? I can’t tell him, just as I can’t tell anyone else. So I do what I’m skilled at: changing the subject.

“He’s even paying for the school you’ll be going to, and it’s a really nice one. Same one your cousin goes to.”