Chapter 1 — Two Days

“We buried our son this afternoon.

You have two days to get your things out of my house.”

For a few seconds, standing across the kitchen island from the man I had been married to for eight years, I genuinely believed that grief had broken his mind — that no husband, no father, could possibly say those words on this day, of all the days there had ever been.

I was still in my black funeral suit.

The soles of my shoes still carried the damp earth of the cemetery.

My head throbbed with a pain so total that I could not have told you how we had driven home from the graveside; that whole afternoon exists in my memory as a single unbroken ache.

On the counter sat the fading flower arrangements relatives had left after the service.

And by the sink, where it always sat, was the small blue plastic cup my son used every morning for his juice.

I am not going to write much about my son’s illness, or his death, in these pages, and I want to explain why at the outset, so that you understand it is a choice and not an omission.

His name was Leo.

He was four years old.

He was the whole of my heart.

And what happened to him is his, and mine, and sacred, and it is not the subject of this story.

This story is about what his father tried to do to me in the shadow of that loss, and about what I found, in the depths of my grief, that I did not know I had.

Leo is the reason for all of it.

But his suffering is not a thing I will lay out for anyone to look at.

I will only say that three hours before Julian spoke those words to me, I had stood at a graveside, and that there is no pain on this earth like it, and that Julian knew exactly what kind of pain I was in when he chose that particular evening to begin.