“Every single one.”

He smiled, and leaned his head back against my arm, comfortable, certain of me, a child who no longer had to calculate the weather of the adults around him because the one adult left in his house had made herself as reliable as the sunrise.

For a long time — for years — I had been so afraid that leaving Julian would break my son’s heart.

That is the fear that kept me.

I had stayed in a cold and hollow and beautifully appointed marriage because I believed, the way so many of us are taught to believe, that half a father was better than none at all, that a child needs his dad even a diminished and distracted and unreliable version of a dad, that keeping the family intact on paper was worth almost any private cost.

I was wrong.