“Diane. Ask him.”
“What if she’s using him? What if they’re planning something? What if someone is putting him up to it?”
“Ask. Him.”
But I didn’t. I built theories instead. I read articles about grooming, online manipulation, teenagers pulled into things their parents never saw coming. Every headline gave me a new version of the same fear: something was happening, and I was the last person to know.
“What did he do?”
I watched my son do push-ups in the yard and saw a stranger.
Karen caught me outside the grocery store that afternoon with that specific brightness moms use when they’re about to hand you a grenade wrapped in tissue paper.
“Did you hear what Lucas did this morning?”
My stomach tightened. “What did he do?”
