For six weeks, my wife had believed that I had failed, and abandoned her, and cut her off in her most vulnerable hour — because my own mother had looked her in the eye and told her so, while draining the account I had left to protect her.

“And Stephanie?” I asked.

My voice had dropped to somewhere very low.

Wendy swallowed.

“She said I should stop acting like a spoiled princess.

Just because I’d had a baby.”