Then: “Is Dad coming with us?”

“Do you want him to?” I asked, very gently.

She shook her head against my chest, hard, and hid her face.

“Dad only wants Tristan.”

There it was — the whole of it, in four words, from a four-year-old who had already understood the thing it had taken me five years to let myself see.

My decision, which had been forming for a long time in the dark, was finished.

Zachary had removed me from the group for the twenty-eighth time, and this time I was not going to wait to be let back in.