It was something else the question revealed, something I could prove, because it was right there in the asking.

It revealed the category into which my son had filed us.

You do not ask that question about people you experience as your parents.

You ask it about assets.

Somewhere in the months of Amber, without my noticing the day it happened, Hazel and I had stopped being, in our son’s mind, the mother who mortgaged her lake house for him and the father who quietly kept the roof over his head — and had become, instead, a holding to be inherited, a timeline to be optimized, a pair of names standing between him and a number.

That is what the question told me.