Children are the most honest witnesses a marriage has.

They do not know the vocabulary for what is wrong, so they carry it in their shoulders and their sleep and their careful, sidelong questions, and they cannot lie about it the way adults can.

Toby’s relief told me the truth about our home more plainly than any document — that a child had been bracing, every evening, against a tension he was too young to name, and that the tension had run so constant he had assumed it was what a home was.

Brandon, downstairs on the intercom, heard that relief too.