Rowan took a plea agreement, some months later, on charges tied to the forged financial documents: probation, restitution, and a permanent bar from ever working in regulated finance again.

Our divorce was final the following spring.

I kept my condominium.

I recovered most of what had been quietly siphoned out of our marriage.

And I was granted a custody arrangement built on Rowan’s actual conduct, documented and dated — not on the moving speeches he gave in a courtroom about the father he swore he was going to be.

Chapter 15 — The Man in the Mirror

A year after Felix was born, my father stood beside me in a sunlit backyard and the two of us watched my son take three wobbling, triumphant steps across the grass from one of us to the other, and fall, and laugh, and demand to do it again.