Everything arrogant in him drained out through the soles of his feet.

His face went gray.

“Mom,” he said, and his voice had gone small and young.

“What — what happened to you?” Edith buttoned her blouse, unhurried, and turned to face her son.

“You never looked close enough to ask,” she said.

And then Natalie told him.

She stood in that little room and told Colton the whole of it — the fire, the window, the beam, the backward walk through the flames — and I watched a grown man shrink, sentence by sentence, as it landed on him what his mother had actually been carrying all this time.

Not a tantrum.