As the days passed, Rosalie slowly regained her strength, and our son grew steadily healthier, and the two of us did not, I want to be honest, fall instantly back into a romance, because real life is far too complicated for that kind of ending.

There were years of genuine wounds between us — the missed dinners, the canceled trips, the long slow erosion of a marriage by my absence, and then the terrible silence of six months in which she had faced a high-risk pregnancy believing I had chosen not to know.

None of that dissolves because a man finally shows up at a hospital.

It has to be healed, slowly, with patience and with proof, and proof takes time.