That wanted him erased, wanted Emrys to grow up as if his father had simply never been.

I sat with that want for a long time before I decided against it, and the deciding is the thing I’m proudest of in this whole story, more than the company or the house.

Because I realized that using Emrys to punish Dashiell — even a Dashiell who deserved punishing — would have made me, in the one way that mattered, into them.

It would have been treating my son as a weapon in a war between adults, which is exactly the thing I was leaving.

So I asked for the thing that protected Emrys and no more than that: supervision, so he’d be safe; therapy, so that if his father wanted to become a real father the door was open; and no vengeance dressed up as justice.

I wanted my son to be able to say, someday, that his mother had protected him without poisoning him against his own father, and that if the relationship failed it failed because of Dashiell’s choices and not because I’d closed the door.