I’d confused silence with keeping the peace for so long that I’d nearly erased myself from my own story. I didn’t put that on him. I just smiled. “Because I wanted you to see your father as your father — not as someone I was competing with.”

Wyatt thought about it. “Can someone be a good person but still do bad things sometimes?”

I brushed the rain from his hair. “Yes. Most people are more complicated than a single mistake.”

Late that night, after the boys were asleep, I sat at the kitchen table surrounded by paperwork, the house quiet but for the hum of the refrigerator. My phone buzzed — Barrett’s name.

I answered on the third ring.

“Loretta,” he said, drained.