She checked Nigel’s side of the bed and the bathroom drawers. She pushed junk around the junk drawer. The Crouches had an endless supply of matches; Juno pocketed several boxes and moved to a different drawer where she found an unopened package of LED tap lights. She held them for several minutes, considering. Winnie had probably forgotten they were there. She stuck the package in the waistband of her pants. Then she decided to check Sam’s room for the clippers.

She didn’t like snooping in Sam’s room, and she didn’t do it often, being that Sam was the person she liked the most in the house. Sometimes, when she had extra time, she’d wander up there to see what he was reading or what little project he was working on. Without turning on the light, her eyes scanned the silhouettes of furniture. She found everything tidy and put away. No pieces of metal lay scattered across his desk, either.

Generally, tiny remnants were strewn about his room as he built model airplanes or put together a tiny wooden T. rex with parts so small Juno could barely pick them up with her fingers. But today, something was off. Looking around, she noticed an absence of the usual stuffed animals that sat on his bed. The posters of superheroes were gone, too, fresh navy paint on his walls to replace the light blue wallpaper. Juno harrumphed. He’d gone and grown himself up overnight.

She remembered their conversations in the park, and suddenly the nail clippers were forgotten. She found herself nudging the mouse to his desktop, and the screen sprang to life. Having raised two sons, Juno knew the types of things boys got up to online; for that reason, she avoided his open internet browser and looked beyond that, at his desktop. He was working on something; it looked like the back end of a website. Sam-Side.

She slumped into his chair, not taking her eyes from the screen. Had he designed this? She’d hired people to do this for her when the internet became a thing, for the business. Kregger had reassured her when she was intimidated by all the buttons and screens—and then when all the buttons disappeared, and it was just screens. Her website had been amateur compared to this, and it had cost her a whopping twelve hundred dollars in the early 2000s. But here he was, a thirteen-year-old boy building his first website. They made them different nowadays, and she suspected he was tired of building toys—at least the ones they made for boys. She tried to understand what she was reading. It was a blog. She could see several blog titles in the box that said DRAFTS, all of them yet to be published.