Eleanor is worried about her.

There was no line about Leo.

Not a word.

On the morning his own son rode off on a school bus in a blazer he thought his father had chosen for him, the only child my husband thought to mention was someone else’s.

I read that text twice, standing in my gleaming kitchen, and I felt the first cold crack run through the beautiful surface of my life — the first hint that the suit was a cage, and that the door of it had been open the whole time, and that I had simply never tried it.

I keep coming back to that — that the door had been open the whole time — because it is both the most freeing and the most painful thing I learned, and the two cannot be separated.