I was wrong.

I was so completely, catastrophically wrong, and I would spend a long time afterward reckoning with the fact that the danger to my son had been sitting behind those beautiful gates the entire time, and that I had driven him straight to it and kissed him goodbye.

That is the guilt I have had to learn to carry, and I will not pretend it away in the telling, because it would be dishonest to.

I dropped my son at that house.