“I’m not abandoning him,” she whispered.

“He already lost his real parents.

Now he’s losing the man he thought was his dad.

I’m going to be the mother he deserves.”

Eight days later we sat in Julian’s office to sort out the guardianship, and somewhere in the second hour he raised the other question — what the boy would be told, and when, and by whom.

“He’s six,” Chloe said.