I allowed her one supervised afternoon a month with Rose.

It was not much.

But it was more than nothing, and more than I had once thought I would ever offer her, and it was given not because she deserved it but because I had decided that Rose would grow up in a world made of second chances rather than sealed doors, and that decision had to start somewhere, even with Evelyn.

Adrian came, too.

He did not come inside.

He stood outside the perimeter gate, at the edge of the celebration, and he looked, when I saw him there, older, and smaller, and ordinary — a man you’d pass on the street without a second glance, which is all he had ever really been, underneath the borrowed importance I had once mistaken for substance.