I had watched this precise mechanism destroy other families from the outside, dozens of times.

It is a very different thing to feel it working on you from the inside, to feel the guilt do exactly what it is engineered to do, and to have to reach past it to the colder clearer place and decide, deliberately, not to be managed by it.

So I let them believe it was working.

“You’re right,” I said, and I made my voice soft and a little ashamed.

“I have been away too much.