After practice, I drove Ash home. We didn’t talk.
I dropped him at the curb and watched him walk up the stairs, hoodie pulled tight, not looking back. I waited until the porch light blinked on before I left.
I haven’t moved since.
The news replayed in my head all night, a feedback loop of horror and guilt and betrayal.
The kid we took in, the one we swore to protect, was the thing we feared most.
All those memories, hugging him at the wake, giving him Cap’s puck, teaching him how to tape a stick, now twisted and poisoned, retroactively criminal.
I keep thinking there was something I missed, some tell in his voice or the way he hugged too hard or the way he always lingered at the edge of every conversation, like he was collecting data for a case nobody else could see.
I want to call Ash. I want to hear his voice, even if all he says is “fuck” on repeat. But I’m afraid of what will come out if I open my mouth. I’m afraid I’ll break something that can’t be fixed.
Instead, I stare at my phone. I scroll past the team chat, which is a disaster zone of memes and black humor and nervous energy.
I skip over Nia’s texts, which have gotten shorter and colder in the last week, her patience with my absences draining by the day.
I stop at the contact labeled MOM.
I haven’t called her since the funeral. She left a voicemail yesterday, said she was “thinking of me, always.” I deleted it after the first five seconds, but the guilt stuck around.
I hit the call button before I can change my mind.
It rings twice. On the third, she answers, voice clear and warm as soup. “Darius?”
For a second, I don’t know what to say.
She fills the silence. “I was about to go to bed. But I’m so happy you called, baby.”
I swallow, hard. “Sorry it’s late.”
“Don’t be silly. I’d rather hear your voice at midnight than not at all.”
I breathe out, slow, and let her words wash over me. The sound of her is the only steady thing in the world right now.
“You heard about Caleb,” I say, not a question.
A pause. “Yes. I saw the news.”
It’s silent on both ends for a while, the shared weight of it bigger than either of us.
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” I admit. “He was just a kid, Mom. He lost his brother, he lost everything. And the whole time, he was?—”
“Hiding,” she says, soft and sure.
“Yeah.” I want to cry, but the tears won’t come. “How do you ever trust anyone, after something like that?”
She thinks about it, doesn’t answer right away. "You know what your grand-mère used to say?" she asks, slipping into the half-French cadence she uses when she's channeling the old country.
I shake my head, even though she can’t see me.
“She said, ‘People are oceans, Darius. You only ever see the surface. Maybe a wave, or the foam. But you have no idea what’s below.’”
She lets it sit there, the silence gentle this time.
“Doesn’t that scare you?” I say. “That you can never really know someone?”
