A harder man, or a humbler one, might have asked why a woman who loved him would vanish without a single word of goodbye.

Might have flown to wherever the trail led and knocked on doors.

Might have refused to accept a disappearance secondhand, from the one person in his life who had always wanted that woman gone.

But I did none of that, because doing it would have required me to risk learning that I was not the wronged hero of the story but a fool who had been played, and my pride could not survive that risk, and so my pride chose not to look.

My mother understood me well enough to know it would.

That is the most unsettling thing about being deceived by someone who loves you: they do not trick you against your nature.