“The whole time.

You knew I wasn’t making it up.”

Mark opened his mouth, and there was nothing in it that could repair what he had done, and he seemed to know it.

“Yes,” he said, barely above a whisper.

“I knew you were in real pain.

I always knew.”

And that, of everything said in that room, was the sentence that hurt Martha the most — more than the layoff, more than the drained account, more than all the months of lies.

Because it meant that none of it had been a terrible misjudgment, a father genuinely failing to understand how sick his child was.