But six months is a long time, and the math did not stop being wrong just because I wanted it to, and slowly, underneath the candles, something colder began to stir.

What I felt, in those weeks of wrong arithmetic, was the specific low dread of a parent who senses that a child is keeping a secret and cannot tell whether the secret is small or catastrophic.

Every parent of a teenager knows some version of it, the sudden closed doors, the quick-locked phones, the answers that do not quite add up.

Most of the time it is nothing, the ordinary and healthy pulling-away of a child becoming a person, and you learn to let it be.