Those are two separate accounts, and I keep them separate, the way I taught him to keep his fatherhood separate from his fraud on a lawn seven years ago.

He can be a good father and still be a man I will never again share a life with.

Both are true.

My children get the first one.

I get to keep the second one for myself, and keeping it is not bitterness.

It is simply the refusal, hard-won, to ever again mistake someone’s improvement for a debt I owe them.

His father’s trust was restructured through the court into a protected fund for the three children’s education, and I never touched a dollar of it.