And in it was the whole of what had been done: three children who had reached the age of seven without a single fact about the man whose eyes one of them wore, who had to ask their mother, in front of two hundred people, whether the weeping man might be their father, the way you’d ask the name of a bird.

Every cruelty of the last seven years was folded into the ordinariness of that question.

Grayson heard it, and I watched him understand that no amount of money or apology or time would ever unmake the fact that his own son had to ask.

Chapter 12 — I’m Not Marrying You

Because Serena crossed the lawn to us, and knelt down to the children’s eye level, and offered them a quiet, real apology for all the shouting — the only adult on that lawn, I noticed, who thought to speak to the children as people.

Then she stood and turned to Grayson.