We’re going home.”

I have thought since about how much of my job, all those years, came down to that one small distinction, offered to a child in a moving car: that’s his to carry. Because the thing a lie like Rhett’s and Elke’s really does, the lasting damage of it, is not the divorce or even the stolen years.

It is the way it tries to install itself in you, to become part of how you see yourself — the wife who wasn’t believed, the children who weren’t claimed, a whole family taught to feel like a scandal.

Bitterness is the mechanism by which it does this; bitterness is how the lie keeps living in you long after the liar is gone, doing their work for them for free.