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something useful.
    But when it came to dealing with his son, things were less straightforward. What was the right thing to do when your seventeen-year-old trashed your car, fled responsibility by drinking himself into a stupor in the company of a sleazy tow-truck driver, and turned up unconscious on the porch at one in the morning?
    If he and Audrey were to do the wrong thing now, handle this badly, John might spiral into a life of irresponsibility, waste, and degradation. And it would be all their fault.
    What did other parents do?
    He had no idea. He wasn’t in the habit of confiding in anyone about anything. Audrey, on the other hand, had girlfriends she’d have shared this with by now. Maybe they would have some useful advice.
    The telephone on Harold’s desk rang and he picked it up. It was the insurance adjuster again. Now they wanted him to have the car towed from where it was to one of their approved autobody shops to have the estimate done, and if warranted, have the vehicle repaired. This detail had somehow not been mentioned in their earlier conversation, before Harold had called the autobody shop. The adjuster gave him a list of three approved autobody shops in his area to choose from, and Harold wrote them all down. He looked them over, noted the closest one, and picked up the phone again. He sighed, annoyed at the complication, and thought nothing’s ever easy .
    â€¢ • •
    T HAT MORNING, AUDREY took advantage of the opportunity to methodically search Dylan’s room. Harold was at work, Dylan had gone to school, and John was sleeping it off in his own bedroom.
    Audrey felt a little guilty about this—about letting John sleep in and miss school; she felt instinctively that it wasn’t the kind of thing that the leading child-rearing experts would recommend. She probably should have had him up and out of the house, and made him function through his day sick as a dog. That’s what Harold would have done, but she simply didn’t have the heart. Besides, when John eventually got up, she would have a chance to speak with him alone.
    She felt a little less guilty about searching Dylan’s room. She had long ago decided that secrets—which were similar to and closely related to lies—had to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Was the secret or lie, as the case may be, serving the greater good? That was the test. And here, she had probable cause to believe that Dylan had misused her bank card. And, rather than wrongly accuse him—and destroy that trust that she had spent an entire lifetime establishing—she thought she’d better be sure of her facts. And so she was rummaging stealthily through Dylan’s dresser drawers, and in his closet, and under his mattress—and discovering the pornographic magazines (which she’d expected), and the condoms (which shook her badly), and the little white pills with the E stamped on them .
    Audrey sat on the side of Dylan’s bed— he was only fifteen —stunned by what she’d found. There was no sign of anything expensive and electronic that might have been purchased illicitly with her missing money. But the evidence of what Dylan was really all about—it wasn’t just basketball and talking to girls on the phone, then—was strewn all around her on the bed.
    Too late, she heard John up and stumbling down the hall toward the bathroom. Which would take him right past Dylan’s open door and Audrey herself, sitting on Dylan’s bed with her cache of—
    Why hadn’t she closed the door?
    Audrey froze, certain she was about to be caught in one of the more compromising positions of her life. But she needn’t have worried. John barrelled past her, bent over, and then she heard his awful, wrenching vomiting.
    If he missed, I’ll kill him , Audrey thought.
    â€¢ • •
    A T LEAST JOHN had no need to fake remorse; this was the real thing. He hung listlessly over the