Chapter 7: Your Pills

I stood in the dark under my own window and watched my mother not move.

She wasn't looking at the phone.

She was looking at the wall.

I went around to the back slider, eased it open, and walked down the hall on the edges of my feet.

The office door at the end was shut, a line of light under it.

Dwight had slept in there since spring.

"Campaign calls," he'd told my mom. "I don't want to wake you."

I opened my bedroom door.

"Mom?"

She turned her head slowly.

Her eyelids were heavy and slow in the lamplight.

"Laine." She frowned at my empty bed, then at me. "Where were you?"

"I couldn't sleep. I went and sat by the pool."

"You never can't sleep." She said it like a fact she'd been taught. "You sleep so well this summer."

I sat down beside her.

Her robe was on inside out, the seams showing.

"What are you doing with my phone, Mom?"

She looked down at it.

"Oh. It needs an update. Dwight said." She smiled.

"He said it's been buzzing all night on the counter, and you'd sleep right through it."

"So I should bring it in and do the thumb so it can install."

"Do the thumb."

"Your thumb, baby. Hold your hand and press it. It doesn't wake you. He's done it before."

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