He was almost finished with what he was working toward; he was closer every week.

He was saving; he was, only not for himself.

Caleb never once told me an outright falsehood, I realized later.

He simply let me supply the wrong object for all his true sentences.

He said saving, and I heard bike.

He said almost there, and I pictured a boy pedaling down our street.

He never corrected me, because the not-correcting was the whole point, but he never actually lied either, and I have come to see that as one more small mercy in a story full of them: that even while he was deceiving me for six months, my son could not quite bring himself to tell me something that was flatly untrue.

He only let me deceive myself, and helped me along, and hated, I think, every minute of it.