Fighting to make his family love us seemed so much more exhausting than simply pretending I did not care.

And so, year after year, I watched my two children make themselves smaller, quieter, less hopeful, to fit inside the shape of their father’s lies.

That is the part I find hardest to forgive, even now, harder than the lie he told about me.

Children are not born knowing how to want less.

It is a thing they learn, and they learn it by watching what happens when they want the ordinary amount.

Piper learned it the third or fourth summer, when she stopped asking to come and started, instead, asking only what Daddy would bring her back — trading the big impossible wish for a small permitted one, the way you learn to do when the big wish keeps breaking your heart.