Nikki tried to turn the knob. Locked. She stood there for a moment, not sure what to do or think. There were only two reasons to lock a door: to keep one’s self in and protected, and to keep one’s family out and excluded. Either way, she didn’t like it.

She pressed her ear to the door and held her breath, hoping to hear him moving around or snoring. Silence.

She knocked tentatively. “Kyle?”

Nothing.

Her instincts began to stir the pot of motherly emotions. He had been withdrawn lately, too quiet. He had gone to a New Year’s Eve pizza party two blocks away and had come home too early and in a bad mood.

She knocked a little harder, spoke a little louder. “Kyle? Are you awake?”

No response.

Now her heart was beginning to beat faster. Recent stories of teen suicides rose in her mind. She berated herself for working too much, not being with the boys 24/7. She cursed their father for his neglect. All in a span of three seconds. She rattled the doorknob again and raised her voice. “Kyle Hatcher, open this door. Now!”

She let anger rise to the surface. It was easier to deal with than the fear that her son might have done something to harm himself. She began to think about kicking in the fucking door.

Kyle called back in a groggy voice. “I’m sleeping!”

Nikki let out a breath of relief. “If you were sleeping, you wouldn’t have answered me.”

“I’d be sleeping if you weren’t pounding on the door.”

“Open the door.”

“I’m not dressed.”

“Then put some pants on and open the door.”

“Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Kyle, open the door, or I’ll kick it in. I mean it. And guess whose allowance will pay for the repairs?”

She could hear him stirring then, muttering curse words.

“No swearing!” she snapped.

“You do it!”

“Not when I think you can hear me.”

“You’re such a hypocrite.”

“I’m an adult. Double Standard is my middle name. Open the door.”

The door opened a foot and the profile of her firstborn filled the space, blocking her view of the room behind him. She had to look up at him, which seemed completely wrong. He was only five feet seven, which made him small for fifteen, but he was still taller than she was. In plaid pajama bottoms, a T-shirt, and tousled blond hair, he was still more of her little boy than he was the man he was too quickly trying to grow into, but he was on his way.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “Marysue said you came home early last night.”

“I’m fine,” he muttered.

“What happened to the party?”

“It was boring.”

He had yet to make eye contact with her. Suspicion rose inside her.

“Look at me,” she said.

He looked at her sideways with his right eye.

“Turn and face me,” she ordered. “Now.”

Frowning hard, he turned and squinted down at her, his left eye swollen, an unmistakable knuckle abrasion skidding across the crest of the cheekbone beneath it.

The bottom dropped out of Nikki’s stomach. “What happened to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Kyle—”

“I tripped and fell.”

“Into a fist?”

She advanced and he yielded, stepping backward into his room. Nikki followed him in. She didn’t look around to see if he had been trying to hide anything. If Kyle wanted something hidden, it was already done. The Library of Congress should have been as organized as her son’s bedroom. Anything hidden was well hidden. It would have taken a team of crime scene investigators to dismantle the place in order to find it.

“Sit down,” she said.

He sat on the edge of his bed, frowning, squirming, trying to twist away from his mother’s hands, the same way he had done when he was five. Nikki grabbed hold of his chin with one hand, and he winced as her thumb pressed into a fresh bruise.

“Ouch!”

“Be still!”

She snapped on the nightstand lamp with her other hand and zeroed her critical gaze in on his face.

“What happened?” she asked again.

“Nothing!”

“Kyle! Goddammit, I know what it looks like when someone has been punched in the face! What happened to you? The last I knew you were going to a party. Just a few friends at the McEvoys’, you told me. The science club, you told me. What happened? You got into a fight over the theory of relativity? Did creationists crash the party and start a rumble? I don’t understand how you went to a party of science geeks and came home with a black eye.”

“It’s no big deal!” he said. “Just let it go, will you?”

“I’m calling Mrs. McEvoy—”

“No!”

Nikki stepped back and jammed her hands on her hips. “Then spill it, mister. And you’d better not leave anything out. It’s your bad luck your mother is a police detective.”

“It sucks,” he said, looking down at the floor.

“Well, it can suck for ten minutes or it can suck all day long. Your choice. I’m not leaving this spot until I have an explanation. Where were you when this happened?”

“On the lake,” he said. “We went skating. We ran into some kids, that’s all.”

“You ran into some kids and what?”

“I crashed into a guy and he got pissed and he hit me. That’s all.”

He was lying. She always knew. He had yet to acquire his father’s ease with it, thank God. Hopefully, he never would. Where Speed would look right at her, wide-eyed, and spew a streaming line of bull, Kyle wouldn’t make eye contact. He looked off and down to the left, as if he was staring at an imaginary teleprompter feeding him this crock of shit.

Nikki sighed and sat down beside him. She put an arm around him and put her head against his shoulder.

“You make life more complicated than it needs to be.”

She could almost hear his thoughts: You don’t know anything. You don’t know anything about me. She’d had those same thoughts herself at fifteen. Life had seemed unbearably complicated and difficult, and no one had understood her, least of all her parents. They could have put bamboo shoots under her fingernails and she would never have told them anything.

She put her right hand gently over Kyle’s left, which was pressed hard into his thigh. The knuckles of his right hand were swollen, the middle one split open. He had fought back. Whoever had given him that shiner had gotten something back in return.

“Let’s see that eye,” she said, getting up.

Tenderly, she pressed her thumb along the brow bone, wondering if she should take him for an X-ray. A blood vessel had burst in the inside corner of his eye, filling the white with blood. While it looked scary, she knew from personal experience it was no cause for true alarm.

“Do you have a headache?”

“I do now,” he muttered.

“Don’t be sarcastic. I can drag you to the ER and we can waste our day there while they ask you all the same questions in triplicate. Follow my finger with your eyes,” she instructed, drawing a line in the air to the left and back to the right. His vision tracked.

“Do you feel nauseous?”

“No.”

“Any double vision?”

“No.”

“Why did you lock your door?”

“’Cause,” he said stubbornly, then thought better of leaving it at that. “I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want R.J. bothering me.”

Fair enough, she thought. R.J. could be like a big golden retriever puppy—curious and lovable and annoying all at the same time. He was still too much of a little boy to understand the seriousness of being fifteen.

“Make yourself presentable,” she said, moving toward the door. “Marysue is making eggs. I want you to eat something. Then you can have some Tylenol and spend the rest of the day brooding. All right?”

He shrugged and looked away, and her heart ached for him. She would have taken all his hurts away and eaten them for breakfast if she could have.

She went back to him and pressed a kiss to his forehead. “I love you,” she said softly. “Nothing is ever as bad as it seems.”

A mother’s lie, she thought as she left his room, her memory calling up the image of a dead girl lying broken on the road.