I only found out about my mother’s online boyfriend when I looked over her shoulder as she sat at the desktop in the kitchen. Up until that point, she’d been a perfect mother. She’d always put a Stouffer’s lasagna in the oven without me having to ask. She’d never gone anywhere without first announcing to me where she was going. We’d been sharing an apartment since I graduated high school.

That winter, I was seeing a girl who rarely left her cockroach-infested apartment. She lived in the basement, the slit-like windows crusted over with rock salt. When I opened the door, she beamed at me from the cocoon of her bed. There was always a glass filmed with dust on the table, and I liked to think that she forgot to drink water altogether between my visits, that only my presence reminded her of this primal need.

She liked for me to do all sorts of things to her—rip her clothes, make her cry, smother her face with a pillow. Sometimes I hesitated when she asked, but I always did it, so I guess I had to like it on some level. Afterwards she was happy and grateful, which put me in a good mood because it led me to think that no one had done these things for her before.

I was twenty-five, lean, and having lots of thoughts all the time. I wished I could hook a device up to my temples that would print them out so I could read them again later. I wished I could publish them as a book.

My father left when I was fourteen. He didn’t gamble or drink or beat us, so I assumed that it was me. I knew this wasn’t necessarily the truth, but it was what I believed, and it became easier to believe the longer I believed it. I’d been on an anxious campaign of redemption ever since, vowing to keep my mother and I safe from bad men. I was the new patriarch of the family. I would protect us with my hypervigilance.

What made me angry about the boyfriend was that I couldn’t understand why my mother hadn’t told me. Didn’t she care what I thought? I couldn’t fathom the sorts of things they might talk about. My mother inhabited a world of frozen lasagnas she cooked for us and PBS specials she taped for us to watch while we ate.

I waited for my mother to leave the room, then logged into her account. His name was Hector. He lived in our city. Her last email to him was about breathing techniques.

I forgot about Hector for a while. I spent hours in my room listening to concertos and writing my thoughts in a leather notebook. I went to Renée’s and ate Hamburger Helper. When she asked me to choke her, I thought about the glove on the Hamburger Helper box.

It was easy for Hector not to exist. I had never met him before.

But when I came home, my mother was laughing into the phone. She sat on the counter, her bare feet swinging. I felt like I’d been jarred back into consciousness, which upset me. I didn’t like the idea that consciousness was something I could lose.

I banged around in the silverware drawer. I slapped a pot on the stove and started boiling nothing, then turned on an egg timer. She didn’t seem to notice any of this.

I realized she was eating from a carton of pistachio ice cream. “Where’d you get that?” I said.

She covered the receiver. “The store.”

I left. I walked into the city. I imagined that every person I passed either was Hector picturing my mother naked or someone who knew more about Hector than I did. My face burned despite the cold.

As if on cue, a man stopped me. “Are you okay?” he said.

“Do you know a man named Hector?”

The man scratched his dandruffed hair. “Sure. One works for the post office.”

I couldn’t believe what was happening at first. I’d passed the post office a few blocks before. My stomach tightened. “What’s he like?”

The man laughed. “Bit of a weirdo.”

There was the possibility that this man was wrong, that Hector did not work for the post office, and that he was not strange. But there was an equal possibility that the man was correct, and I believed the latter, since I’d already had a premonition that something awful was happening behind my back. Hadn’t my stomach tightened?

When I returned home, I was even angrier, and my mother was still on the phone with Hector. She didn’t hear me come in, and I listened from the hall. He was now on speaker. They were still talking about breathing techniques, but this new conversation was tinged with lewdness and malice.

“You can’t get too excited,” my mother said. “It’s possible to over-enlarge the diaphragm.”

“Well,” Hector said. He laughed. “You always excite me.”

I felt lightheaded. After my father left, my mother told me that he had seen prostitutes throughout their marriage. Was Hector perverted too?

“Don’t forget that we have lunch tomorrow with Renée!” I shouted.

“I don’t know if that will work for me,” she said.

“It’s a family lunch! Family only!”

I realized with a sear in my gut that if I didn’t take action, Hector would become my stepfather. I couldn’t let that happen.

I knew my mother kept a gun in her nightstand. I didn’t like this. “What if the intruder comes into my room first and kills me?” I’d said once. “Then what would you do?”

“Stop watching so much TV,” she’d said.

I crept into my mother’s room, took the pistol from her nightstand, and put it in mine. I needed to be prepared. I was unsure what anyone was capable of.

I drove us to Buca di Beppo. Renée sat in the front with me. My mother sat in the back. I could see her tapping on her cell phone in the rearview mirror.

It was eleven on a Tuesday, so they were able to seat us in the Pope Room. As soon as we sat down, I smoothed my napkin over the seat of my ironed khakis.

My mother had chosen to wear her hair in an ugly wet bun. “May I have a Shirley Temple?” she asked the hostess who’d seated us.

“Mother,” I said. “She’s not our waitress. She’s only the hostess.” I smiled at the hostess, shaking my head.

A pad of paper and a pen had appeared in the hostess’s hands as if out of thin air. “Actually, I’ll be taking your drinks too.”

I coughed and tried to make eye contact with Renée, but she was staring at the bust of Benedict XVI at the center of the table.

After I ordered us three lasagnas, I took my mother’s hand, then Renée’s. “My girls,” I said. “It’s so nice to be here with only my girls.” I was having wonderful imaginings that involved homemade jam and picnics, clean linen and snow days. “I think that family is the most important aspect of life.”

“The Puritans didn’t,” my mother said. She let go of my hand, and it flopped onto the red and white checkered tablecloth. “They decided their mothers and wives were witches, then strung them up in front of everyone.”

“Where’d you hear that?” I said.

“They did a special on PBS about it. It came on after you went to bed.”

“Maybe I should watch it,” I said.

She sipped her Shirley Temple. “I don’t think you’d like it.”

I laughed and poked Renée. She was folding her straw wrapper into a worm-like shape. “Then why’d you bring it up?” I asked.

“I thought Renée might like to hear about it.”

Renée looked up.

“Renée doesn’t care about the Puritans,” I said.

“How do you know that?” Renée said.

I didn’t know what my mother was trying to prove, but it didn’t make any sense, and the fact that it didn’t make any sense made me angry. Why ruin our lunch at Buca di Beppo? The way she’d been acting since she met Hector (if she’d ever even met him in person) was bizarre.

Then she pulled out her phone, and I could hear my heartbeat in my ears.

“What is wrong with you?” I said. “Can’t you see how rude you’re being?”

“I just need to send a text.”

“Why can’t you be more like Renée?” I shouted. “Renée is always polite to me. Her behavior is pristine.”

The hostess set down our giant pans of lasagna and scampered away. My mother picked up her purse. She smiled at Renée and winked. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said. She stood and started for the restroom.

“Sit down and eat your lasagna,” I said.

She ignored me.

I could’ve screamed. I didn’t understand why any of this was happening. It was like someone kept knocking over my chess pieces.

That’s when a thought arose in my head that hadn’t before: Hector was influencing my mother to act like this. If my mother was consorting with Hector, a strange and malicious character, then she was also strange and malicious. She was also a threat. And if Hector was strange and malicious and a pervert, he was like my father.

Then I became confused. Being his son, was I similar to my father? My mind flashed to different scenes with Renée—me grabbing her and holding her down in various positions. By that logic, was I like Hector too?

My hands shaking, I turned to Renée. I decided that God had made her just for me. She was perfect, and we would spend the rest of our lives together.

I leaned over and kissed her right on the mouth.

When we got home, I shoved some clothes in a bag and went to Renée’s. I spent the next few days in a gentle girlfriend haze. We propped our arms up with pillows and played rummy. I talked about the book I wanted to write (By that point, I’d decided it would examine the metaphorical similarities between tennis and Catholicism). Renée listened intently, nodding when it was appropriate. She didn’t say much, but it didn’t bother me. I pretended she was on vocal rest.

At one point, I fell asleep and had a dream that Hector had stuffed my mother in a closet. He held the doorknob as she shook it from the other side and sobbed. His post office uniform was damp with her tears.

He turned to me. “Let’s get some ice cream,” he said. “Pistachio?”

Then his face melted off.

I woke up because Renée was shaking me.

“Why are you touching me?” I said. “I was having a prophetic dream.” I was cold all over, and my mind pulsed. What could it mean? Was Hector getting off on my mother’s suffering?

“I want to watch a film I bought,” Renée said.

The post office uniform corroborated what the man on the street had said. But what about the pistachio ice cream? Was that just another sign that I was on the right track? I needed to take some notes. “Can you get me paper?”

“It’s directed by Jacque Lemaire. We did a unit on him in my film class.”

“Hey,” I said. “I’m talking to you.”

“It’s called Pomme de Terre,” she said, brandishing the disc at me.

“Will you shut up? The doctor told you to be quiet.”

We stared at each other for a moment. I began to feel that I was in hell.

“I’ve never heard of this fucking movie,” I said.

She laughed, a tinkling, dove-like sound. “You wouldn’t have. It’s very niche.”

I threw off the hospital-like blanket and stood up. “Do you think this makes you sound smart or something?” I shouted.

She didn’t seem shocked by my words. Her face had the same wiped quality as my mother’s, which made me even more upset. She turned her shoulders away from me and gazed up at the window. What she could possibly be seeing through the grime was beyond me.

“Hello?” I said.

I realized she’d put earbuds in. If I listened carefully, I could hear metal lyrics about dragons and swords.

I cried out.

She did not react.

I stomped off to the bathroom and locked the door. I counted out a minute. She did not come check on me. French music began to drift under the door.

I got on my knees and looked through the keyhole. Renée was propped against the headboard, her eyes fixed on the TV. Her shoulders, usually frail, looked hearty from this angle. When I pictured her face, it was always solemn and drawn, but now she was smiling softly. Something funny happened, and she laughed.

Terrified, I opened the bathroom window and climbed out into the snow.

I walked quickly towards home. When that wasn’t enough, I began to run. I’d been wrong about Renée even though I’d felt so strongly that we were meant to be together. We had no business getting married. I’d known her for only two months. In fact, I found many aspects of her person repellent, like her greasy bangs and her monkeyish arms.

How had I convinced myself that she would be my wife?

Now that Hector’s perversion had been confirmed, he was even more like my father. My gut wrenched. Following that logic, I was more like Hector as well. Was I just as bad? I had evidence to prove that I wasn’t: I wanted to protect my mother, I hated my father, I had never seen a prostitute. But there were all the ambiguities I couldn’t tally on that side—the good side—or on any side at all. It was true that I still missed my father, and it was true that I got a thrill out of hitting Renée in a sexual setting. Why had I put the gun in my nightstand if I didn’t intend to hurt someone?

Once the thought that I was bad had entered my mind, it wouldn’t leave. It bit down and nursed. I felt more and more like I would begin to cry.

Downtown, I passed an electronics store. A man carrying a TV burst out and began running in the opposite direction I was. He was wearing bright blue sneakers.

A police officer stopped me. “Have you seen a man carrying a TV?” he asked.

I nodded.

He pulled out a pen and a notebook. “What did he look like?”

I opened my mouth to say he was wearing blue sneakers, then closed it. How could I be sure? It was an odd color for a shoe. It could’ve been a trick of the light or my eyes. But what if the sneakers really had been blue? This was even more terrifying to me. If my first thought about the shoes had been correct, then nothing stopped me from being a bad person. “He was wearing green sneakers,” I said.

The police officer nodded and wrote, and I felt that what I’d said was still not quite right, so I began to run again, fearful he would track me down and arrest me for lying once he found the man.

Every intake of breath made my lungs ache.

When I opened the front door, my mother was watching the news. A story about a local child molester was on. I was bombarded by thoughts. What if, deep down, I was a pedophile? If I was capable of hurting Renée, was I capable of hurting a child? My mouth filled with saliva like I was going to vomit, and I sank to the ground.

“Are you okay?” my mother asked.

A toilet flushed. My head snapped up. “Who’s here?”

“I think you know who’s here,” she said quietly.

Hector walked in, retucking his shirt. “Hello there,” he said, and it seemed as if it were an invitation.

I leapt to my feet. “Stay back!”

“What is going on?” my mother said.

I began to pace. “I know what kinds of things you think about all day at the post office. You are not welcome in this family.” My imaginings flashed by, blurring my actual vision: Hector shoving my mother, threatening her with disgusting sexual acts. Hector being arrested as the child molester.

“The post office?” my mother said.

And here was my once-perfect mother allowing our home to be tainted with evil. I rushed to her and shook her back and forth. I slapped her like I sometimes slapped Renée.

Then her eyes rested on me. They were just my mother’s eyes.

I have never been more afraid.

I ran to my bedroom and threw open the drawer of the nightstand. The gun was loaded, another sign. I pointed it at my forehead. I was a child molester and an abuser, and I needed to end my life.

“Neal?” my mother called. “Please let us come in there.”

“Go away,” I said, my limbs rippling with shame. My face and neck and chest were wet.

My mother and Hector reached the doorway. My mother began to sob. Hector spoke softly. I realized he was giving me directions for how to put the gun down.

I thought about Hector. I thought: mother-hitter, child molester, pervert. I pointed the gun at Hector.

I thought about myself. I thought: failure, pedophile, scum. I pointed the gun at my forehead.

I went on like this, swinging the gun back and forth, for a long time. It would only occur to me later that I’d already been doing this for years.

Emma Estridge is a writer from South Carolina who attends Wofford College. Her work has been featured in So to Speak, The Interlochen Review, and Unfortunately, Literary Magazine.