Every erasure I accepted, I accepted because fighting it would have forced my son to choose between his mother and his wife’s family, and I was terrified — genuinely, deeply terrified — that if I made him choose, he would not choose me.

So I made sure he never had to.

I kept myself small and quiet and grateful precisely so that I would never have to learn the answer to the question I was most afraid of.

And then, at two in the morning, reading a text that banned me from my own grandson’s birthday, I understood at last that I had already learned it.

He had already chosen.