It meant teaching him that real love never requires you to endure endless disrespect to keep it.

That distinction became the quiet compass of everything I did in those months.

For a long time I had confused two things that only look alike — keeping a family together, and keeping a family’s story intact.

The story was the beautiful photograph: mother, father, child, the appearance of wholeness that everyone from Rosalind on down expected me to preserve at any cost to myself.

Keeping the family together was something else, something Toby and I already had, complete, in a two-bedroom apartment in Pasadena with a drawing on the fridge.