But somewhere in ten years of two-a.m. feedings and duty rotations and teaching five children to tie their shoes and stand up straight and tell the truth, that hunger had quietly starved to death, and what was left in its place, watching Rhett’s face come apart, was something closer to pity than I ever expected to feel for him, and beneath the pity, mostly, a bone-deep weariness.

Because there is nothing to celebrate in watching a man discover, in public, over his father’s coffin, that he threw away his own children and his own marriage for a lie he never bothered to check.

It is not a victory.

It is just waste — ten years of it, laid out on the grass between us — and no amount of my being right could turn it back into the years my sons and daughters might have had a father, if their father had been a different kind of man.

He looked at Wes first, because Wes was closest and tallest, and I saw him register the jaw, his own jaw, his father’s jaw.