We were already in the parking lot of a Residence Inn on the frontage road, so we followed a smudge of light that seemed to be the lobby and parked under the portico. I booked a two-bedroom suite, but that quickly seemed like an iffy idea so I changed it to a room for Stefan to give him privacy and one for me, not even on the same floor, because why would you want to share a suite with anyone, even your mother, especially your mother, on your first night out of jail? The rooms were generous vistas of downtrodden brown tweed carpet and the kind of overly pebbly white walls that could rip an elbow out of a sweater. Down the hall from Stefan was a woman herding three little girls and three miniature greyhounds, all of them yipping up a storm. A slight, pretty girl in a crop top and squeeze-tight leggings, her extensions coiled around her regal skull, gave us handfuls of emery boards and press-on nail kits as we passed her, sweetly sharing her fear that her home-salon event was going to be snowed out. I saw her heavily-kohled dark eyes sweep appreciatively over Stefan, saw him notice how she looked at him, and wondered if anything would have happened had I not been there. I almost regretted that I was.

Fluttering around Stefan’s room, I said, “This is awful.”

“Not to me,” Stefan said. “It’s heaven.”

The hotel had a sort of little convenience store in the lobby that carried a few things we would need to stay overnight, toothbrushes, bottles of water, the most cursory kinds of comfort food. Although it was only late morning, Stefan wanted the kind of meal he would have craved as a teenager. He flopped on the bed with a spoon and a carton of ice cream, Häagen-Dazs Rum Raisin, his favorite, which he had not tasted in years, and a microwave cheese pizza. As I sat across from him, drinking black coffee stirred up from the hot tap water and stingy little packets, he ate the whole pint of ice cream and three-quarters of the pizza and, and then, to his humiliation, threw it all up.

“I’ve been hungry for years,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

He looked so young. I thought of him on his first day of preschool, when he gravely explained that he no longer wanted his fried eggs flipped over. When he finished breakfast that morning so long ago, he said to me, “You know what, Mom? You’re my sunny-up egg.”

Now he told me, “In AA, they say the whole thing is to trust the process. You just do one thing at a time.”

“You went to AA? But you had regular group counseling.”

He was silent. Then he said, “No.”

“What? Stefan!”