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"Merry Christmas, Mom."

"Merry Christmas, honey. Call your sister."

He sends pictures all day.

A tourtière on a kitchen table covered in a plastic tablecloth with snowmen on it. A red pickup truck in a driveway with a man in a toque standing next to it, holding up one thumb, not smiling. My dad. This is his happy face. A kitchen floor with a long scratch in the linoleum. THE SCRATCH. It's historic. It's from the slide in 2015.

At seven o'clock he video-calls. His face fills the screen, flushed, with a paper crown from a Christmas cracker sitting crooked on top of his head.

"Joyeux Noël!"

"Merry Christmas."

"Where are you? Is that a fireplace?"

"I'm at the lake."

"The lake house? You went?" His face does something complicated. "By yourself?"

"By myself."

"Owen."

"It's fine. It's good, actually. It's quiet."

Somebody behind him says something in French, and a woman's face squeezes into the frame next to his. She's small and dark-haired, with his exact eyes, and she's wearing the same paper crown in green.

"Is this him? Is this the sad bear?"

"Maman!"

"Hello, sad bear!" She waves at me. "Merry Christmas! You come next year, okay? I'll make you tourtière. Rémy says you eat like a bird. I'll fix that."

"I—thank you, Mrs. Castel."

"Josée," she says. "Next year. I'll hold you to it."

She disappears. He's bright red under the crown.

"I'm so sorry," he says.

"Don't be."

"She's very⁠—"

"She's great." I mean it. "She's great, Rémy."

He looks at me through the screen for a long time. He's in a hallway now, I think, a narrow one with family photos on the wall behind him. He's lowered his voice.

"I miss you," he says.

It's the first time either of us has said anything like that.

"It's been two days," I say.

"I know. I miss you anyway." He's watching my face. "You can say it back. Nobody's listening. It's a lake."

I look at him on the screen, in his paper crown, in the hallway of the house he grew up in.