The two easy errors were both forms of letting love override judgment.

The first error would have been to refuse Andrew entirely — to let the betrayal and the abandonment harden into a permanent wall, to decide that a man who had left could never be trusted again, and to deny Noah his father out of a wounded pride disguised as protectiveness.

Many people, badly hurt, choose that, and call it strength, when it is often only fear wearing strength’s clothes.

The second error, the opposite one, would have been to fling the door open at the first tears — to let her love for Andrew and her longing for the family they had almost had override every hard-won caution, to welcome him back on the strength of a single reunion, and to discover, later and too late, that nothing underneath had actually changed.