No more pretending everything was fine when it was breaking.

Never again.

Chapter 18 — Slowly

I want to be honest about what happened after that day, because the easy thing, the tempting thing, would be to end the story in that living room, with the baby in her mother’s arms and the promises made, as though a single hard conversation had fixed everything.

It did not.

Of course it did not.

The months that followed have been genuinely hard, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.