“You have no idea what your son has done, do you?”
Then he turned to Wyatt and said, very quietly:
“Please. Tell her the truth yourself right now, or I’ll have to.”
I looked at my son.
He couldn’t even look me in the eye.
“Wyatt,” I said. “Look at me.”
He looked at the floor.
“Wyatt.”
He lifted his head.
“Mom,” he said. His voice cracked in the middle. “I pretended to be Mr. Quinn.”
I didn’t understand the words.
“You what?”
“On email. I made an account. GrahamQuinn.HarperDad at Gmail.” He swallowed. “And I pretended to be you, too. On a fundraiser.”
The room tilted.
Mr. Burke sat down in his chair very slowly.
“Start at the beginning,” I said. “Right now. All of it.”
So he did.
In January, when the doctors said relapse, Harper had stopped wanting to talk about it. She told Wyatt the second round of chemo wasn’t working. She said her doctors at Bramble Creek Regional kept saying they’d “explore options,” and her parents kept saying “we’ll see,” and she was tired of everybody whispering in the hallway outside her room.
