“Is Dad not coming home for dinner?” I wiped my face and turned around and looked into my son’s gentle, worried eyes — worried, even now, even wounded, about me.

“No, sweetie,” I said softly.

And I reached back and took his drawing from his backpack, and I folded it carefully, along its lines, to preserve it.

“Dad isn’t coming home.

But you and I are going to build a wonderful life together.

Just the two of us.” I did not throw the drawing away, and I have thought about why.

It would have been the easy thing, the symbolic thing — to tear up BEST PILOT EVER and be done with the man who had betrayed the child who made it.