“Every day!” “Then explain to me,” I said, “why she’s been alone since Sunday.” And Teresa went quiet, because there was no answer to that, no answer that did not indict all three of them.

So George shifted tactics, the way he always did, and raised his voice loud enough for the nurses in the hall to hear.

“You’ve been abandoning your family for months to chase your military career,” he said, “and now you want to play the perfect mother?” Once, that particular guilt-trip would have found its mark; George had spent years training me to feel that my work was a kind of abandonment, that my competence was a betrayal of my proper place.

But I was past that now.