A screaming match is a fight the guilty party can often win, because it drags everyone down to a place where it becomes one person’s rage against another’s, and the facts get lost in the noise.

What I had learned, in fifteen years of handling creatures that could hurt me, is that the person who stays calm is the person who stays in control — and that the moment you lose your temper, you have handed control to the situation.

So I did the hardest thing I have ever done.

I sat on my own kitchen floor, with the evidence of my children’s abandonment all around me and the woman responsible about to arrive, and I made myself cold, and clear, and quiet, and I began, methodically, to gather what I would need.

Not because I felt calm.