“That isn’t the same thing.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

She regretted the question as soon as she asked it. Noah looked down at the worn edge of the table, where Matthew had once sanded a splinter after Lily cut her palm. Sarah had spent two years asking her children to tell her the truth, even when the truth was inconvenient. Now she had made honesty sound like an admission of guilt.

“I was angry,” Noah said.

“You had a right to be angry.”

“That’s not what you asked.”

Sarah took a slow breath. “No. I asked what you intended to do if those boys actually came at you.”

“Get Lily out.”

“Then why say together?”

Noah rubbed his thumb against a scar across his index finger. “Because Blake was using the other two to make himself look brave. I wanted them to know I could see all of them.”

“And if it worked the other way?”

“Then I made a mistake.”

It was the answer she had feared. Sarah wanted to protect her son from the town’s gossip and from the harder parts of himself. She was beginning to understand she could not do both by telling him to disappear.

She opened the laptop and typed an email to Grant Danner requesting a meeting and preservation of any footage recorded by the academy’s security cameras. She did not accuse anyone of a crime. She asked whether the loaned gloves had been inspected and whether a responsible adult had witnessed the exchange. She copied the recreation center’s general office.

Noah watched her type.

“Are you going to make Lily quit?”

“Not tonight.”

“She loves it there.”

“I know.”

“Then don’t punish her for what I said.”

Sarah turned the laptop toward herself. “I am trying to make certain nobody gets punished for something they didn’t do. Including you.”

Upstairs, Lily sat on the bedroom floor beside Walt’s cane. He had taught her to thread the needle, but the lining of the glove had been torn too badly for a safe repair. He set it aside.

“Some things can’t be fixed with a stitch,” he said.

“Will they take my scholarship away?”

“They’d have to explain themselves to your mother.”

“That’s a yes?”

“That’s an old man trying not to promise what he can’t promise.”

Lily considered this, then asked the question that had been waiting inside her all evening.

“Is Noah going to hurt somebody again?”

Walt’s face changed. “What makes you ask that?”

“He stopped competing after Simon got hurt. Mom says it wasn’t his fault, but Noah doesn’t believe her.”

Walt leaned against the bed. He remembered Simon Bell as a small boy with solemn brown eyes and an astonishing ability to laugh at his own mistakes. Simon had belonged to the Erie Harbor Judo Club, the same place where Noah had trained since he was six. When they were fourteen, Simon and Noah were as close as brothers, trading sandwiches and studying tournament schedules as if they were secret maps.

The accident happened in March 2023, six weeks after Matthew’s funeral. A regional tournament in a school gym had been crowded and understaffed. Simon was competing against a seventeen-year-old athlete in a higher weight division after an administrative error. His coach protested but was told the pairing was permissible under a special exhibition rule. Simon, eager to prove himself, said he wanted to continue.