Chapter 10

Am I in Trouble?

Natalie's POV

Noah's teacher stopped me at pickup, tablet still tucked under one arm, kind eyes soft with the particular caution of someone about to say something delicate. Mrs. Alvarez always smelled faintly of chalk and burnt coffee, a smell I'd come to associate with reassurance over the years, though today it did little to settle the unease already gathering in my chest.

"He seemed a little far away today," she said. "Not quite himself. Everything all right at home?"

"We're figuring some things out," I said, which was the only true thing I could offer her without offering far more than either of us had time for.

She nodded in a way that told me she understood more than she was letting on, the way good teachers so often did, reading the quiet static between a parent's careful words. "He's a good kid," she added, touching my arm briefly before I turned to go. "Whatever's going on, he's going to be okay."

I wanted very badly to believe her. I wasn't entirely sure yet that I did.

Noah didn't say much on the drive home, which wasn't like him at all. Most days, he narrated the entire ride—recess dramas, a boy named Wesley who'd once eaten a crayon on a dare, whatever small catastrophe or triumph had defined his morning. Today he simply watched the world slide past the window, quiet in a way that felt, somehow, louder than any of his usual chatter.

"You okay, baby?" I asked at a red light.

He shrugged—five years old and already fluent in the particular shrug that meant I didn't want to say it out loud.

It hadn't always been like this. Only two weeks ago he'd come barreling out of that same school so thrilled he'd nearly tripped over his own feet, chattering for a full twenty minutes about a clay dinosaur he'd molded in art class, a lumpy, crooked-legged little creature he'd named Steve with the absolute solemnity only a five-year-old could summon for something so small.

Steve still sat on the kitchen windowsill, one leg still slightly crooked where the clay hadn't quite dried right, a smear of green paint still faintly tacky in places. I passed him every morning making coffee. 

At home, I made Noah his usual snack—apple slices, peanut butter, the same combination he'd eaten a hundred times without complaint—and set it in front of him at the table.picked at it instead, moving the slices around his plate without lifting a single one to his mouth.

"Noah." I sat down across from him, folding my hands to keep them from fidgeting. "Talk to me."

He looked up. His eyes carried a seriousness that didn't belong on a face that young, a weight I'd been noticing more and more lately, as though he were quietly shouldering something far too large for someone his size.

"Am I in trouble?" he asked.

The question landed like a hand pressed flat against my chest.

"What? No, sweetheart. Why would you think that?"

He picked up an apple slice, considered it, set it back down untouched. "You and Daddy don't talk anymore. Not like before. And when you do talk, it's quiet talking. The kind where I can't hear the words."

He wasn't wrong. Daniel and I had become quite skilled at whisper-fighting over the past weeks—quiet enough that Noah couldn't make out the actual words, apparently loud enough, in every other way, that he'd absorbed the tone anyway, the tightness, the careful distance we now kept across every table in the house.

I didn't say anything right away. I couldn't.

"I thought maybe I did something," he went on, quieter now. "Like maybe I was too loud, or I didn't clean my room well enough, or—"

"No." I slid out of my chair and knelt beside him so I was looking up into his face instead of down at it. "Noah, look at me. None of this is because of you. Not one single bit of it."

"Then why is everyone sad?"

I didn't have a clean answer for that. Not one a five-year-old could actually carry.

"Sometimes grown-ups have hard things to work through," I said carefully. "It isn't your job to fix it. It isn't your fault that it's happening. Do you understand?

He studied me for a long moment, the way he always did when deciding whether or not to believe something, and then nodded, slow and only half convinced.

"Okay," he said. But I could tell some part of him still didn't fully trust it.

"Do you want to talk about anything else?" I asked. "Anything at all?"

He considered this with real gravity. "Can we get a dog?"

That nearly startled a laugh out of me, the first genuine urge toward one I'd felt in days. "We'll see."

"That's what you say when it's a no."

"It's what I say when I mean maybe." I squeezed his hand. "What kind of dog?"

"A big one. Like a wolf. But friendly."

"We'll see," I said again, and this time something in his face eased, just slightly—the first real smile I'd managed to coax out of him all day, small and fragile, and I held onto the sight of it like something precious.

"Eat your apples," I told him, and he finally did.

I stayed on the floor beside his chair a little longer than I strictly needed to, because standing up again meant returning to the exhausting work of pretending I had any of this handled.

That night, after he'd fallen asleep, I sat on the edge of his bed and watched him breathe. He slept the way he always had, one arm flung dramatically over his head, mouth slightly open, utterly unaware of how much weight he'd been quietly carrying around all day without ever telling me directly.

I thought about the shrug. The quiet talking he couldn't decode. The question that had knocked the breath clean out of me at the kitchen table.

He'd noticed. Of course he had. I'd spent months telling myself he was too young to register any of it, that children his age lived safely inside their own small, protected worlds, untouched by the weather happening just above their heads. That had always been a lie I needed badly to believe. It made the mornings easier. It let me keep moving forward one more day without facing what my staying was actually doing to him.

But he'd noticed the silence. He'd noticed the tone. He'd noticed enough to wonder, in his own small and devastating logic, whether any of it might be his fault — which was precisely backwards, and which was the part that gutted me most completely. None of this belonged to him. All of it was mine to fix, or at the very least mine to stop pretending I was somehow powerless to.

I thought about Mrs. Alvarez's face at pickup — not quite himself, she'd said, as though Noah had become two separate boys lately, and she could already tell, just by looking, which one had shown up to school that day.

I thought, too, about how many other people at that school probably already knew about the photographs. Parents talked. Children overheard things they were never meant to hear, absorbed fragments of adult conversations they didn't yet have the tools to fully understand. Maybe another child had said something careless at recess. Maybe that, too, was part of what Noah had been quietly carrying all day, something I couldn't even ask him about directly without risking making it worse.

I brushed his hair back gently from his forehead. He didn't stir.

"I'm going to fix this," I whispered, mostly to myself, testing the shape of the promise in the dark. "I promise you that."

I didn't yet know what fixing it would actually look like. I only knew, with sudden and unwelcome clarity, that I could no longer keep doing what I'd been doing all this time—which was nothing at all, carefully dressed up as patience.

I went back to my room, picked up my phone that was on the nightstand and noticed I had a text.

It was Maya. *You up?

I called her instead of texting back. She answered on the first ring, as though she'd been waiting.

"Noah asked me if he was in trouble today," I said, no greeting, no warm-up. "Because Daniel and I don't talk right anymore."

Maya went quiet for a beat. "Oh, Nat."

"I keep telling myself he doesn't notice things. He notices everything."

"Kids always do." Her voice was gentle, though I could hear steel underneath it too, the particular steel she used when trying very hard not to say I told you so. "What are you going to do?"

"I don't know yet."

"You keep saying that."

"I know."

She let the silence sit rather than pushing into it, which was one of the things I loved most about her. She always seemed to know precisely when to press and when to simply let me breathe.

"I should let you sleep," I said eventually.

"Call me tomorrow. I mean it."

"I will."

We hung up. I sat on the edge of my own bed a while longer afterward.

My phone buzzed again.

It was Marcus.

Can we talk? Somewhere Daniel won't be.