I was sitting at my desk finishing a report when my ex-husband’s name flashed on my phone screen. Howard was at Jasper’s house that week, so I answered immediately. “Hey, so.Don’t freak out,” Jasper said. My heart rate doubled before he finished the sentence. “What happened?”“Howard broke his leg.He fell off his scooter. Freak accident. I was right there with him.I saw the whole thing.”Howard is ten. He is energetic and brave and still my baby. I grabbed my purse, told my boss it was a family emergency, and drove to the hospital.

Howard looked so small in that big hospital bed. A bright blue cast was already wrapped from his ankle to his knee, and his eyes were red-rimmed when I leaned down to kiss his forehead. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.“For what? You didn’t do it on purpose.”“For falling.” He wouldn’t look me in the eye. Something in that small evasion snagged at me.I asked gently whether he had been doing tricks. Howard loves trying to jump the curb on his scooter, and I have told him a thousand times to wait until he is older. I was not even angry.I just wanted to know. “I told you,” Jasper interrupted. “He just lost his balance.No tricks. Just a weird slip on the driveway.”Howard shifted uncomfortably in the bed. He looked at his dad, then at his cast, then at the floor.Something was off. I could feel it clearly, the way you feel a temperature change in a room, but I did not want to start a fight in front of my injured son.