He signed away primary custody with the pen still warm from writing a check he didn’t want me to see, and he told himself, I think, that he was being generous.

I thought the worst of it was over.

I thought the war was winding down and all that remained was the slow, unglamorous work of boxes and forwarding addresses.

I didn’t know that while I was taping up my kitchen, a completely different bomb had already been walked through my mother-in-law’s front door — and that it wouldn’t be me who lit the fuse.

Chapter 4 — The Golden Boy