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Theo’s sniffles matured into an all-out cry. “I’m sorry, Mama. Please don’t be…dis-pointed.I can still be…a good kid.”
“Theo, youarea good kid,” Joel reassured him. “We know you didn’t mean it, but sometimes, even when we don’t mean to hurt the people we love, we can still hurt them really badly. And wouldn’t you feel terrible if youreallyhurt Thandie?”
Theo nodded.
“So you see why we have that rule about how we love each other?” Ayesha asked.
“Yes, Mama.”
She released him. “Okay. Go apologize to Thandie.”
Theo turned. “Joel, do you still love me even though I did something bad?”
Joel wiped away the tears on Theo’s cheeks with his thumb, then folded Theo into a hug. “Always. We’ll love you forever. Forever and ever and ever.”
“And ever?”
“Now you’re asking for too much, bud.”
Theo, giggling, stepped back. “I’ll go ‘pologize now.”
After one more round of hugs, he left the room, swiping and rubbing at his eyes.
Joel rose from his crouch and sat beside Ayesha on the mattress. The slippery fabric from her cover-up brushed the side of his calf. “Think it’s us making him more aggressive?” he asked. “Me and the guys, I mean. Because of what we do?”
“He doesn’t know exactly what you guys do,” she said. “Plus, he thinks of you as some kind of superhero who defeats bad guys.” She reached across and stroked the middle of his back, and she might as well have proposed marriage. “I don’t know, Joel. Something’s going on with him.”
“We’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“We?”
“Yes, we. Me and you.”
She groaned. “But I don’t want to. You do it.”
Then she smiled, but he couldn’t return the gesture. Not when she was sitting next to him, the woman he’d loved for so long it felt unnatural that they weren’t “together.”
“I’m kidding, of course,” she added.
His gaze shifted to her mouth.
All it would take was one kiss, and their agony would be over. No other woman had caught his eye, but it wasn’t as though he’d looked for one. Had he tried to date, the minute the woman came close enough, she would have seen Ayesha’s reflection in his irises.
“Hey, Ma?” Josiah lightly tapped on the door, severing their connection. “Are you and Joel still talking to Theo?”
They slid apart.
“You can come in, Siah,” she said.
Josiah poked his head inside.
When he spotted them sitting next to each other on the bed, he entered the room holding sheets of paper in one hand with a beach towel draped around his shoulders.
“Are you guys busy? There’s something I have to show you, and it’s kind of weird.” He took a seat in the space between them. “Um, so Theo and Thandie were drawing earlier, and Theo drew something, like I said, pretty weird.”
He flipped the papers over.
The first was a child’s drawing of a figure. The figure had no features to speak of, not even a discernible face, and was jet-black from head to toe. It stood in front of a house as though staring at it, but it was difficult to tell whether it was the Maui or Sweden house.
