That I made it easy.

She stood there in a soft taupe coat, holding a baby bottle in trembling fingers. A little boy sat in the stroller under a pale blanket — blond hair, bright blue eyes, one hand wrapped around the leg of a stuffed giraffe clipped to the bar.

He was beautiful. He was also one year old.

One year after my divorce. One year after Connor had stood in a mediator’s office and said our marriage had become emotionally impossible because I was distant, ambitious, obsessed with work.

One year after he’d looked me in the eye and told me there was no one else.

The child reached for the giraffe again, fingers chubby and unsteady, with no idea that the adults around him had built a life out of secrets, or that those secrets were about to step into fluorescent light.