Love you, Mom. I’ll see you at dinner.
He had thought he was coming home.
Brendon moved to stand beside me. “He was fine, Olivia. We walked around the block. He didn’t say a single word about feeling wrong.”
I kept my voice level. “Did he mention anything about dizziness before he went down? Chest tightness? Any kind of discomfort?”
“No. Nothing like that. He was happy.” He said it too quickly. “We were talking about baseball. He wanted to practice pitching after dinner. He just tripped, that’s all. It was an accident.”
I watched his face. When he finally looked directly at me, something moved across his expression — there and gone, like a shadow crossing water. Fear, guilt, or the particular combination of both that appears when someone knows more than they’re saying.
“Brendon, you understand that if there’s anything else — anything at all — I have to tell the doctors.”
