Grandad and Mom let me stay up until midnight. We put on punk rock music and move the furniture around after the police leave. Mom and Grandad take pictures first, of every inch of the house the way it looked when we got home, like the officer suggested, and we start a list of all the missing stuff. By midnight, the list is two pages long. We even leave off the weird stuff. A paper clip holder. Fragrant soap. Toenail clippers.

We move the living room around so it faces the dining table—Grandad says, “That way we can’t ever have our backs turned to each other.” Mom orders a new rug on the internet and reorganizes her books.

I sit in the spot on the cement floor where Grandad sat earlier in the day and I try to meditate the way he does. All I can do is picture Dad flying through space with my baseball stuff poking out the back window.

Mom and Grandad talk pretty loud sometimes. Mom cries a little, but Grandad keeps saying she’s “better off” and then they talk about the mug.

“He knew what he was doing,” Grandad tells her.

“I know,” Mom says.

“He was never gonna change, kiddo,” Grandad says. “He was just getting meaner.”

“I know,” Mom says.

In the morning, as I sit at the dining table munching on a bowl of cereal, I look around and the place feels new. Even with all our old stuff, something about it feels completely refreshed and comfortable.

But when I see Mom at first, she looks like she cried all night. That’s not new at all.

“How you doing?” she asks.

“Good.”

She gives me a hug and kisses me on the head. “I love you like crazy, Mac.”

“Love you, too,” I say.

“It’s all very sudden,” she says. “You’re probably in shock.”

I nod and chew. Cheerios are so delicious.

She starts making herself a cup of tea and Grandad arrives from the basement. “I slept until seven thirty!” he says.

Mom laughs.

He says, “First time in months I managed past five.” He looks around. “The place looks great.”

“I’m not in shock,” I say.

“I didn’t say you were,” Grandad says.

Mom goes quiet while she pours water into her cup, then says, “I did, Dad. Sorry, Mac. I shouldn’t tell you how you’re feeling.”

And now I feel bad because I don’t want Mom to be apologizing to me. Not today. Not ever. I might be in shock. But I’m not as in-shock as she is because I know the truth and she doesn’t.

“I have something I have to talk to you about,” I say.

Mom sits in her usual seat at the table—across from me longways—and she feels too far away for me to talk about this. It feels like it should be whispered. Without Grandad here.

Neither of them says anything.

I look at Grandad and he raises his eyebrows and says, “I’ll be back in ten minutes. Nature calls.”

I rinse my cereal bowl and leave it in the sink and sit down closer to Mom.

“Look,” I say. “This is going to sound really weird, but just listen, okay?”

“Okay,” she says.

I breathe big. Twice. Then: “Dad kept something from you for a long time and he shared it with me and it always felt wrong that I knew this and you didn’t.”

She looks worried.

I continue, “He doesn’t think he’s from Earth. He thinks he’s not human. And the secret we worked on in the garage was his spacecraft.”

The moment hovers. She looks me right in the eye. “Spacecraft,” she says.

“He used to take me for rides in it late at night when you and Grandad were sleeping. Not a lot. Like once a month or so. Usually to eat junk food,” I say. “He’d say he was from two galaxies away and is kind of like an anthropologist, here to learn about us and live a normal human life to be able to report back. It’s probably why he took such weird things when he left.”

Another moment hovers. “Anthropologist,” Mom says.

“I know it sounds like he was just making up a story for me. And sometimes it seemed like it was just a story. But other times, it was like he … meant it. He wanted to fix Grandad’s old car so he could get home. He said he’d been stuck here for—”

“Thirteen years?” Mom interrupts.

“Yeah.”

She sits with this information for a minute and nods and purses her lips. She goes to say a few things but stops herself until she finally says, “You’d go on, like, flights? In space?”

“Not space, really. He couldn’t break the Kármán line,” I say. “That’s sixty-two miles above Earth’s surface. We probably only got up to a mile, maybe. He kept saying he needed elements we didn’t have here. He told me he was probably stuck here for life.”

“I know the feeling,” Mom says.

She seems to be taking this too well. “So you knew?” I ask.

“I knew he was stuck. I didn’t know he was an alien. We’ll keep talking about it.”

“Does Grandad know?” I ask.

“We should tell him,” she says. Then she sends him a text on her phone and he arrives so quickly, I know nature did not call and he was probably waiting on the steps until we were done.

“I’m hungry,” he says. “Anyone want pancakes?”