“And then,” Tom said, “I found the other one. The other phone. The one that goes with it. Last week, when you two came up for my birthday. Remember, Michael? You left your jacket on the back of the chair in the dining room. It fell off when I was vacuuming. And this fell out of the
pocket.”
He reached into his other pocket. He pulled out a second phone. Exactly the same. Small. Cheap. Gray.
He held them up side by side.
“Matching phones,” he said. “Isn’t that sweet? Like matching rings.”
I heard someone gasp behind me. I think it was my mother.
Michael finally found his voice. “Tom,” he said. “Tom, look, this isn’t what it looks like. Let’s go inside and talk about this privately. Like adults. There are kids here.”
“There are,” Tom said. He glanced over at the swing set, where Sophie and Ben were sitting very still. Then he looked back at Michael. “You didn’t seem too worried about the kids thirty seconds ago.”
