Patterns Were My Profession

Henry had hoped he was wrong.

So had I.

That may be the cruelest thing about loving someone, that the evidence so often arrives long before you are willing to accept what it means.

I had all the patterns, months before the hearing, scattered through the bank records and the strange questions and the small wrong details.

Any stranger could have read them in an afternoon.

But they were about my son, and so I could not read them, or would not, because to read them was to accept a conclusion that a mother’s whole being is built to reject.