He had prepared the way a person prepares for a house fire by buying a smoke detector, not because they want the house to burn but precisely because they are terrified that it might.

Every day the smoke detector goes unused is a good day.

Caleb had carried that red box to his mother’s house the way you carry insurance you pray never to claim, hoping with his whole heart that Christmas would come and go and the box would ride home again, unopened, and he could tell himself he had been wrong about her after all.

He had not been wrong about her.