Abigail did her own reckoning with a counselor. Widowed when Spencer was fifteen, she had spent decades trying to compensate for every absence in his life, paying his debts before he asked, turning his problems into her emergencies.

“What would have happened if your son had had to close his first business himself?” the psychologist asked.

“He might have learned to manage his own affairs,” Abigail said.

“And what did he learn because you always rescued him?”

She looked down. “That there would always be another rescue coming.”

She understood then that a boundary didn’t erase love. It only ended a habit that had been dismantling them both.