She paused, and then she said the harder half of it.

“I didn’t do it for you.

I want you to know that permanently.

If it had come down to a choice between you having a son and him having a stable year, you’d have lost, and I wouldn’t have thought about it for very long.”

I found the therapist in the second week of January.

A man named Dr.

Solomon Achebe, who works out of an office over a bank in Wilmington and who I saw every week for the first year and every other week after that.

Our first session was fifty minutes long and I spent about forty of them explaining what my mother had done.