“No. But he’s trying. And so am I.” Melody sat down and put an arm around her daughter. “The problem isn’t the screen time. The problem is that you think the only people who understand you live inside that screen. We want to be people who live in your room, too.”

“That tape wasn’t about the music, was it?”

“It’s an addiction,” David said, tapping the paper. “We’re not a democracy on this. She loses it at night. Full stop.”

Because that was the deep, unspoken dynamic of the Marks household. Not power. Not rules. But a mother who had decided, long ago, that love was not a feeling. It was a verb. And she would conjugate it every single day, in every single argument, until her family learned to speak each other’s language.

She turned off the light and went upstairs, leaving the silence to settle. Tomorrow, there would be another negotiation. A forgotten lunch. A slammed door. A spreadsheet. A silent treatment. And Melody would stand in the middle again, translating, bending, holding.

Melody reached across the counter and put her hand over his. “The phone isn’t the enemy. The loneliness is. She’s not defying us. She’s drowning, and that little screen is her life raft. It’s a bad raft, but it’s the only one she knows how to build.”