I have been asked whether it felt cold, that preparation — whether packing a bag and moving money and copying documents, all while still living as a wife inside a marriage, was a kind of betrayal of my own, a giving-up disguised as prudence.

And I have decided that it was the opposite.

Preparing for the possibility that someone will fail your child is not the same as wishing them to; it is not disloyalty, but the most basic form of parental responsibility, the same impulse that makes you learn where the exits are in an unfamiliar building without believing the building will burn.

I hoped, genuinely, that I would never need the bag or the account or the copies.