I was fighting for my son.

And I have come to think that this shift, forced on me in the most violent way imaginable, was also, strangely, the thing that saved me from the particular despair that might otherwise have finished the job Brandon started.

Because there is a specific kind of hopelessness that comes from being betrayed by the person you trusted most, and it is worse, in some ways, than the physical danger — it is the collapse of your whole understanding of your life, the sudden knowledge that the ground you built everything on was never really there.

A person in the grip of that despair, alone, on a freezing ledge, might reasonably decide that a world containing such a betrayal is not one worth the agony of clinging to.

I felt the edge of that despair.

I want to be honest that I felt it.