“I’m getting close.”

Something felt wrong.

I want to be honest about that, because it matters.

I stood in that doorway and felt, in my gut, the unmistakable sense that I was being handled, that the smooth explanation and the nervous smile were a wall my son was putting up between me and something.

But I did not push.

He was thirteen years old.

He was entitled to some privacy, some corner of his life that was his own, and I did not want to be the kind of mother who tore through her son’s backpack on a suspicion.