He had spent those three weeks looking for a technicality, some explanation that would hand the responsibility back to someone else.

There wasn’t one.

He had three seven-year-old children.

He did not know their favorite foods, or which stories they liked at bedtime, or that Tristan was the one who feared thunderstorms, or that Juniper could not sleep without a light on.

He had missed the first steps and the first words and the fevers and the first days of school.

And whatever his mother had hidden, no one had ever forced him to treat me the way he had.