His face, as Thaddeus laid out the subpoenas, held no dawning recognition of thirty years of cruelty.

It held a man running the numbers on a losing case and deciding when to settle.

That was not a tragedy of misunderstanding.

It was just who he was.

And the strange gift of seeing it plainly, at last, was that it released me from the exhausting project of my whole life — the project of finding the exact right words, the exact right evidence, that would make my parents love me correctly.

There were no such words.

There never had been.

I could stop looking for them.

I could simply take the settlement, protect my son, and go.

Chapter 22 — What Love Isn’t