A Flight Delay Stranded Me at O’Hare, Where I Found the Ex Who Vanished Six Years Ago Asleep Against a Wall With Two Little Boys Who Had My Eyes — Then My Mother Appeared With a Lawyer and a Folder, and Inside It Was a Letter Renouncing My Own Children, Signed With a Signature I Never Wrote

She gave me the cheaper grief on purpose.

And I took it, because it was cheaper, and I called my taking of it maturity.

That is the part I cannot fully forgive in myself — not that I was deceived, but that the deception worked because some part of me preferred it.

Sabine spent six years paying the price of a lie I found comfortable.

I will be reckoning with that for the rest of my life.

Chapter 4 — The Notch