Please.

Can you put him on?”

There is a specific horror in being told your child is in trouble when you are too far away to do anything about it.

Every instinct you own fires at once — go, run, get to him — and then slams into the wall of two states and an airport and the middle of the night, and has nowhere to go.

I stood in that kitchen with the phone against my ear and my whole body screaming to be somewhere it could not be, and I understood, in a way I never had before, that the worst thing about that distance was not the miles.

It was that the miles had been arranged.

Someone had counted on them.

Someone had looked at the map of my grief and my absence and seen not a family to hold together but an opening.

Chapter 2 — Or So I’d Been Led to Believe

Let me tell you how I got here, because from the outside it looks like carelessness, and it wasn’t.

It was trust, which is a different failure and a more forgivable one, though it doesn’t feel that way at three in the morning.

I had been married to Declan Hendricks for five years.

It was my second marriage.

Jonah’s father — his real father, his first one — had died when Jonah was two years old, and for a long time I had believed, the way you believe things you badly need to be true, that the best gift I could give my son was a father figure to grow up beside.