It was the hardest sentence I have ever spoken, watching my wife’s face as I said the glue was meant for your chair, watching thirty years of a mother’s hope go out of her eyes.

But I have never regretted it, because it was the first time I protected her by treating her as an equal instead of a patient — by trusting that the woman who had survived everything she’d survived could survive the truth too, and would rather have it than be spared it.

And she could.

She did.

The color left her face, and then it came back, and something harder and clearer came with it, and I watched my wife begin, in that moment, to stop being the mother who forgave everything and start being a woman who knew her own worth.

Garnet stepped forward.