Some things are too private even for a story that is otherwise honest about everything.

It is enough to say that a mother’s grief for a small child is a country with no map and no bottom, and that I went down into it, alone, on the floor of his room, and stayed there a long time.

And here is the thing I have thought about most, since.

In the room directly below me, my husband was already, I am certain, thinking about logistics — about timelines, and documents, and how soon he could have me gone.

While I lay on our son’s floor holding the shape of an absence, Julian was downstairs doing arithmetic.

That distance between us, those two floors, is the entire distance between a person and a predator, and I had shared a bed with the predator for eight years and never once seen it, until the evening he could no longer be bothered to hide it, because he thought I was already destroyed.