For two years after our divorce we had let every interaction curdle into an argument; we had become, to each other, the sum of our old grievances, two people who could not be in a room without relitigating the marriage.

And Gregory had read that estrangement like a weather report and moved into the gap it left.

But when the danger came, all of that fell away as if it had never mattered, because it turned out it never had — not against this.

Faced with a real threat to our daughter, Christopher and I discovered that underneath two years of pettiness we still shared the one thing that had always been solid: we would both, without hesitation, walk into fire for Abigail.

That was the ground we rebuilt on.