I was doing sums.

I thought about the years, and the promises, and the slow accumulation of small abandonments that had led, as surely as a river runs downhill, to this large one.

I thought about how a man does not become, overnight, the kind of person who walks out of an emergency room.

He practices, in a hundred smaller ways, over a long time, with the steady encouragement of a mother who tells him it is fine, until the large abandonment feels, when it finally comes, like nothing more than a slightly bigger version of what he has always been permitted to do.

Liam had been leaving me alone with things for years.