His mother used to sing in the kitchen.
Not well. That was the thing — she had a terrible voice, slightly flat on the high notes, completely unconcerned about it. She'd hum something while making eggs and then the humming would become words and the words would become this full, unselfconscious performance for an audience of one six-year-old who pretended to be embarrassed and was actually delighted. She'd make faces while cutting fruit. She'd turn the spoon into a microphone. She'd negotiate with him about broccoli the way diplomats negotiate treaties — okay, three pieces, but they have to be the small ones — and somehow he'd always end up eating five because she made it feel like winning.
Breakfast with Beverly was not like that.
He sat at the table in Leonard's six-year-old body and looked at his oatmeal and thought about his mother, and felt the absence of her the way you feel a draft — not dramatically, just constantly, coming through a gap that wasn't going to close.
Michael was next to him, four years old and round-cheeked, kicking his feet against the chair legs in a steady rhythm that Beverly had already asked him to stop twice without looking up from her journal. He kept doing it. Leo respected that about him.
Angelina was across the table, thirteen and radiating the specific energy of someone who had somewhere better to be and resented every minute she wasn't there. She had her hair pulled back and was eating toast with the focused intensity of a person who had decided that if she concentrated hard enough on the toast she wouldn't have to participate in anything else.
Beverly set a plate of cut vegetables in front of Michael.
Michael looked at them. Then at Beverly. Then back at them, with the expression of a man who has been handed a bill he wasn't expecting.
"I don't like them," he said.
"You don't have to like them," Beverly said, turning a page. "Dietary preference is largely psychological. The vegetables contain compounds essential to neurological development. Whether you enjoy consuming them is irrelevant to whether your brain requires them."
Michael stared at the vegetables.
Leo watched Beverly and thought about his mother — the way she'd have gotten down to Michael's level, made the carrot a character, given it a voice, made the whole thing a production until Michael was laughing too hard to remember he didn't want to eat it. The way presence worked. The way warmth worked. The way you could get a four-year-old to do almost anything if you just showed up for the conversation.
Beverly didn't show up. She transmitted information from a distance and considered that sufficient.
She looked up then — not at Michael, but at Leo — with that calm, measuring gaze.
"You're quiet this morning," she said. Not with concern. With the tone of someone noting a variable.
"I'm thinking," Leo said.
"About what?"
He looked at her. At the neat, composed, utterly sealed fact of her. She had laughed once since he'd been here — he'd heard it yesterday, briefly, at something on the phone — and it had been a short, precise sound, controlled on the way out, like she'd approved it before releasing it. His mother's laugh had started somewhere in her stomach and arrived without warning and taken everyone in the room with it whether they wanted to go or not.
"Nothing important," he said.
Beverly held his gaze for one more second, filed whatever she concluded away somewhere, and returned to her journal.
Michael ate one piece of carrot with the expression of a soldier taking a hill.
The elementary school was a low brick building with a painted mural on the front wall and a flagpole and the general atmosphere of cheerful obligation. Beverly walked them to the gate — Michael to the pre-K entrance on the left, Leo to the main building on the right — and crouched briefly to adjust Michael's backpack straps with efficient, practiced hands.
"Have a productive day," she said. To both of them. Equally. Like a memo.
Michael said "bye Mommy" and ran toward his classroom without looking back, because he was four and the world was still mostly fine.
Leo stood at the entrance to his building and watched Beverly walk back to the car, straight-backed, unhurried, already reaching into her bag for her phone.
She didn't look back either.
He stood there for a moment. Around him, other kids were arriving — backpacks, lunchboxes, someone crying at the gate while their mother crouched and held them and said something soft into their hair. He watched that for a second longer than he meant to.
Then he went inside.
The day was exactly as bad as he'd anticipated and in ways he hadn't.
He was twenty-three years old. He had built a business. He had negotiated brand deals and managed his own taxes and once talked a landlord down four hundred dollars on a lease renewal. He had, in the past year alone, given a talk to three hundred people about discipline and self-construction and the architecture of a life well-built.
And now he was sitting in a circle on a carpet with seventeen six-year-olds learning what a noun was.
The teacher — Ms. Petrov, young, enthusiastic, the kind of person who had chosen this career because she genuinely liked children and had not yet had that tested sufficiently — pointed at a picture of a dog.
"What is this?" she asked the group.
"A dog!" said seventeen children.
"That's right! And a dog is a —"
"Noun," said Leo.
Ms. Petrov blinked. "That's — yes, exactly. Very good, Leonard."
The kid next to him, a boy with a gap in his front teeth and an Iron Man lunchbox, looked at Leo with open suspicion.
Leo spent the rest of the morning being very careful about how much he knew.
It was harder than it sounded. Not because he couldn't contain himself, but because the effort of performing six-year-old-ness while trapped inside his own adult mind was its own particular exhaustion — like running with ankle weights, except the ankle weights were the complete accumulated knowledge and life experience of a twenty-three year old man, and the running was pretending to find finger painting genuinely exciting.
He found finger painting genuinely not exciting.
He ate his lunch alone at the end of a table and watched the other kids.
Then he finished his apple slices.
Dinner was pasta and silence dressed up as conversation.
Beverly served it with the efficiency of someone completing a task and sat at the head of the table with her back straight and her attention distributed equally between her plate and her children, which meant neither received very much of it.
Angelina pushed pasta around her bowl. She'd been doing that for ten minutes. Leo had been watching her the way he used to watch things he needed to understand — looking for patterns, reading the signals. She was thirteen and she had Beverly's bone structure and absolutely none of Beverly's composure. Everything she felt crossed her face in real time. Right now what she felt was irritated, and the source of it was sitting at the head of the table reading a paper she'd brought to dinner.
"Mom," Angelina said.
"Mm."
"I got a ninety-four on my history essay."
Beverly looked up. "What did you lose the six points on?"
Angelina's fork stopped moving.
Leo watched her absorb that. Watched the small, particular deflation of someone who had wanted nice job and received where did you go wrong. He knew that deflation. He had felt it in a different hallway, in a different life, standing in front of different people who were kind enough in the functional sense and absent in every sense that mattered.
"Source citations," Angelina said flatly. "I forgot to format them right."
"A mechanical error. Fixable." Beverly returned to her paper. "Ninety-four is a reasonable score."
Angelina looked at her pasta.
Michael, who had been eating with the focused dedication of someone who had accepted his fate, knocked his cup over. Juice spread across the table in a slow, determined wave. Beverly stood, retrieved a cloth from the counter, blotted it up with three efficient strokes, and sat back down. No fuss. No it's okay sweetheart. Just the problem, solved, filed.
Leo watched all of it.
He thought about his mother at dinner. The noise of it. Someone always talking over someone else, the table slightly too small for the amount of life happening around it. The way she'd celebrated a ninety-four like he'd won something, made it feel like evidence of something real about him rather than a performance metric.
He looked at Beverly.
She was reading again.
"Is this how you love us?" Leo asked.
It came out in Leonard's voice — small, unhurried, genuinely curious. A six-year-old asking a question he didn't fully understand. That was the thing about being in this body — the voice did half the work for him.
Beverly looked up. The question had caught her, he could see it — a flicker of something she hadn't been prepared for.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Like—" he tilted his head, the way kids do when they're working something out. "You tell us things. About the vegetables and the neurons and the citations. Is that how you love us? Because it doesn't feel like — I mean, my friend Danny's mom hugs him when he falls down." He paused. "You explain why falling down happens."
Angelina had gone very still.
Beverly set her paper down. She looked at him with those measured eyes and Leo could see her assembling the response, categorizing the question, reaching for the framework.
"Love," she said, "is frequently misrepresented as a purely emotional experience. In reality it manifests in sustained investment in another person's development and wellbeing. Everything I do for this family — the nutritional choices, the academic expectations, the structure I provide — is an expression of exactly that investment."
Leo nodded slowly. Thoughtfully. Let it sit for a second.
Then, in the same mild, wondering tone — the tone of a child turning a rock over to see what's under it:
"But if love is supposed to make us better," he said, "and Angelina is sad and Michael is scared of you and I don't feel very loved—" a small furrow of the brow, innocent as anything — "doesn't that mean it isn't working?"
A beat.
"Doesn't that mean you failed?"
The table was very quiet.
Angelina was staring at him with an expression somewhere between alarm and the very specific satisfaction of watching someone say the thing you've thought a hundred times and never said.
Beverly looked at him.
For just a moment — just one — something moved behind her eyes. Not grief, not guilt, nothing that soft. Something more like the expression of a person who has been presented with a logical conclusion they find unacceptable and cannot immediately disprove.
Her jaw tightened. Almost imperceptibly.
"You are grounded," she said. Her voice was even. Controlled. "For the remainder of the week. What you said was designed to cause harm, and that is not something I will reward with continued dinner conversation."
"I wasn't trying to cause harm," Leo said, still in that same guileless tone. "I was just asking."
"Go to your room, Leonard."
He went.
He climbed the stairs at a six-year-old's pace and did not smile until he was around the corner and out of sight.
Behind him, from the kitchen, he heard nothing for a long moment.
And then the sound of Beverly setting her fork down against the plate.
Not gently.
It was a small sound. A controlled sound. The sound of a woman who had spent thirty years perfecting the architecture of her composure and had just felt, for one unguarded second, the whole thing shudder.
Leo counted it as a win.