Except they aren’t rights. There’s nothing that rhymes with “You have the right to,” only the monotonous repetition of phrases that all begin with “You will.”

My foot catches a piece of gravel as I walk back across our driveway to the rear door. There are so many pebbles, so many bits of stone, and I want to cram them by fistfuls into my eyes to blot out everything I’ve seen, and everything I’m going to see.

For instance, Patrick, standing in the kitchen, doing nothing. Steven, who has emerged from his room by the time I drip all over the doormat, and is now watching with expressionless eyes—doll’s eyes—as the black van that is not an ambulance takes Julia King to her new, and permanent, home.

Sam and Leo have brought me towels. I take them and send the twins and Sonia to bed. Then I go for the kill.

“What the living hell did you do, Steven?”

He shirks away at the sound of my voice, no longer the cocky teen he was yesterday at dinner. “Nothing.”

“What did you do?”

“Let go, Mom!”

Right. So I have my seventeen-year-old son by the shirt collar now, and I’m feeling like I could squeeze and squeeze the fabric around his neck until he’s ruddy and sweating. But this isn’t how I want to be. This isn’t the image I want to see in the mirror tomorrow morning. I lower my voice. “What did you do, kiddo?”

Steven seems to shrink, folding himself into the corner of the kitchen next to the fridge and the shelf that used to hold my cookbooks, a thousand or a million years ago. My eyes slide to Patrick. I need you now, they say, these eyes of mine.

“I d-didn’t—,” Steven stammers. “It wasn’t my fault!”

It. What is it? An old Eartha Kitt tune hammers through my head: Let’s do it.

“Oh, Steven,” I say.

And it—It—all spills out.

“She said she just wanted to make out, to try something. And—” Steven looks to Patrick for help. Finding nothing but a quiet shake of a head, he goes on. “It wasn’t supposed to happen.”

It.

I make a silent promise never to use this word again.

Outside, under the light of the Kings’ porch, Evan is shouting something I can’t understand while Olivia slumps against the brick wall.

“She’ll never get over this,” I say, but not to anyone in particular. Then, turning to Patrick: “Can you do something? Can you talk to Carl Corbin or Myers?”

Patrick’s words are stale. “What would I say?”