Prevention

The whole thing was an accident, how Sharon discovered the situation. Her son drank his usual two mugs of black coffee and wolfed his cereal before she drove him to school. Usually he drove himself, but his car was in the garage. Otherwise it was a normal Tuesday morning and as usual, she planned to drive on to the community college afterwards to pick up material from the instructor she edited work for.

“Do you have everything?” she asked Ethan. He was wearing his habitual outfit of worn black jeans and black T shirt saying something cryptic. Probably just as well she didn’t know what it meant and god forbid, she should ask. He would, as usual, mumble and look away.

After her husband left them four years earlier, Ethan had turned cold and uncommunicative. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see his father, but he didn’t seem to want to even when Karl made the effort, which after a while, he pretty much stopped doing. Now Karl had a new baby with his much younger wife Amber. He’d even forgotten his son’s seventeenth birthday the month before, but Ethan had stoically refrained from commenting on it.

Oddly though, according to Ethan’s older sister Haley, Karl did not forget her birthdays. Maybe that was because she was affectionate toward her father and made an effort with Amber and the baby. Sharon did not allow herself to dwell on how fast Karl had made a new family. She did resent being left to handle Ethan by herself. He was nothing like his sister, who was, Sharon admitted only to herself, her favorite child. There were many reasons for that.

“Let’s go then,” Sharon said. “Got your stuff?”

Ethan followed her to the garage where they got into her Outback and took off for the school. He slumped in the passenger seat while she tried to make conversation, and only grunted in reply. Did he blame her for Karl’s leaving them? Sometimes it seemed that way. He got out of the car, dragging his jacket along without looking back.

She left her phone in the car while she was at the college and only later, when back home, did she notice Ethan’s calls asking her to bring him his backpack, which he said he’d left in the back seat. She supposed that when he drove himself to school, it sat on the passenger side where he wouldn’t miss it. When she checked the backseat and saw the backpack, she felt an irresistible urge to examine it and carried it into the house.

His laptop was in it. Well, of course it would be; they used it during the day. She took it out and opened it. He hadn’t bothered to shut anything down. She set it on the kitchen table and looked. The page was set to a conversation on some site she’d never heard of where three users, one