Another painful pause. Then she asked the question that was tearing her apart. “Was… was the empty pew visible to everyone?”

I closed my eyes, letting the midday sun burn against my lids. “Yes. It was the loudest thing in the room.”

She began to sob then—a wretched, muffled sound that told me she’d been swallowing this grief for two days. “I’m so sorry,” she wept. “I should have been there.

I should have—”

A deeply buried part of me—the little boy who’d always waited for his mother to defend him, to choose him over her husband’s wrath—wanted to forgive her instantly.

But I was no longer just a son. I was a husband. A father.