“Your home. Of course,” Kayla sneered. “Yours and his now. Maybe he should be able to walk in on me without knocking, too. I’ll bet he’d like to.”

“Kayla, unless you have something to say, unless you have some kind of sensible thing to say, do not go there.”

Kayla waved a dismissive hand and went back to her work, but she wasn’t really reading; she was waiting, tensed and angry.

“Do you have something to say, Kayla?” her mother pressed.

“No, Jessica,” Kayla said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Not at all. After all, I’m sure a man who is fifteen years younger than you, and only ten years older than me, has no interest at all in walking in on me.”

Jessica crossed the room with long-legged strides, grabbed Kayla’s shoulder, and spun her around. Kayla half fell from her chair and yelled, “Get out and leave me alone!”

“Listen to me, Kayla, if Arnie has done anything . . . questionable . . . you tell me. Otherwise, you stop spreading poison.”

“Questionable? Has he done anything questionable? You mean, aside from moving into my house and sleeping with my mother in my father’s bed?” Kayla’s voice had risen with each word, louder, more insistent, and by the time she had reached the final syllable, there were tears in her eyes and her voice was a scream.

“I have a right to—”

“To sleep with whoever will have you?”

“You spoiled little—” Jessica snapped.

“Get your hands off me!”

“I am your mother, Kayla, whether you like it or not. I won’t tolerate your disrespect.”

“My mother? My mother wasn’t a slut!”

“Watch your mouth!”

“I don’t even want to be here. Oh, my God, I hate you! I wish Dad hadn’t died!”

Jessica blinked and drew back. “Of course you miss your father, I—”

“Do not tell me that you miss him, too,” Kayla said. Her tone was ferocious, a mix of anger and deep sadness. “He wouldn’t . . . If you had died . . . he would never have . . .”

“He already was,” Jessica said. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she blanched, covered her mouth with one hand, and reached for Kayla with the other. Kayla slapped her hand away.

“What did you just say?” Kayla demanded. “What did you just say? What did you just say?”

“No one in this world is perfect or without failings, Kayla. Not even your father.”

The room felt cold suddenly, the light gone grim and gray, as the two looked at each other. Kayla’s face was red with anger; her eyes blazed through tears. Her mother was abashed but also, somehow, relieved of a burden.

“Go away,” Kayla said. “This is my room.”

“Kayla . . .”

“If he did, it was your fault!” Kayla said. “Now get out. Get out. Leave me alone.”

At that moment the picture froze, though of course it was no picture but a reality, an actual scene that must have played out in some corner of the time-and-space continuum Messenger so casually defied.

“What is the point of showing me that?” I asked Messenger.

“What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and I was none too deferential. I felt bruised by the confrontation I had just witnessed. Maybe it was normal in its own way; after all, mothers and daughters fought. I didn’t know enough to judge who was in the right, or indeed whether they were both right or both wrong.

Messenger let time flow, so next I had to witness Jessica storming from the room and worse, see Kayla break down in tears.

She cried for a long time, deep, wracking sobs, the particular rhythm of a person who has suffered some terrible loss. I found I couldn’t bear it. She was crying for her dead father, and I knew that I must have cried that same way, for that same reason. Perhaps I, too, had lashed out at those around me, unable to come to terms with my own feelings of unfairness and helplessness.

After far too long, Messenger said, “Good and evil are real. But the lines are seldom neat.”

“Great, Obi-Wan,” I said. “And what am I supposed to do with that?”

Messenger either didn’t detect the sarcasm or didn’t consider it worth addressing. He answered the question as though it had been sincere.

“The Messenger must understand,” he said.

“Wonderful,” I said, suddenly feeling exhausted. “So now I understand.”

Messenger did not speak—he waited—and now Kayla was typing again. Not a Pages document but something on Facebook. A status update. I moved closer, curiosity overcoming the niceties of privacy, and read it over her shoulder.

Oh. My. God! she typed. You will not even believe this. But I have a copy of Spazmantha’s so-called manuscript. Okay, here’s the love scene from page 102.

She proceeded to type in an R-rated sex scene between a character named Jason and a girl named Sammie.

It was hastily written, but not so carelessly that it would set off alarm bells in a willing audience that so wanted it to be true.

It was explicit. It was humiliating. It was meant to sound as if it was a poorly disguised version of a sex scene between Samantha and Mason, the boy from the lunchroom. Kayla had some talent—that was the thing. She had enough talent to include some detail for verisimilitude. Enough talent to just about sound as if she was writing something that could be published, though her style could be stilted and overly dependent on multisyllabic words.