My children had been abandoned.

My daughter had been used and coached and frightened.

The woman responsible was about to walk through the door, and there is a version of that evening — a very understandable version, a version most people would not blame me for — in which I met her at the door and unleashed sixteen years of everything at once.

And that version would have felt magnificent, for about a minute, and then it would have cost my children everything.

Because a father who screams and rages, however justified, becomes, in the cold eye of a family court, simply an angry man, an unstable man, a man whose account can be dismissed as the product of fury.