Any mother would have said yes.

Saying yes was not naivety; it was the ordinary trust that lets families function at all, the baseline assumption that a woman asking to take your child to a park intends to take your child to a park.

What I could not have assumed — what no reasonable person assumes — was that the invitation was a delivery mechanism, that the smile was a lure, that she had chosen the olive branch precisely because she knew it was the one thing that would get her what she wanted.

That is the particular evil of it: she used my hope for peace between us as the bait.

And I have made my peace with having taken that bait, because the alternative is to live believing that a mother should assume the worst of everyone, should let no child out of her sight, should treat every kindness as a possible trap — and that is no way to raise a child, and it is exactly the airless, fearful world Sondra herself lived in.

I trusted a family member with my son.