Learning they’d been engineered did not give them back — it only changed their shape, from a private failure I’d blamed on my own body into a cruelty done to me on purpose, which is its own kind of weight.

I saw a therapist, a good one, for a long time.

I learned to set that grief down without pretending it had never happened, and to separate the child I had wanted from the man who had weaponized that wanting.

Some nights it still finds me.

But it no longer runs me, and it is no longer a place anyone can hide crimes, because I finally know it for what it was: not my failure.

His choice.