It is easier to keep believing a likable man’s story than to sit with the discomfort of the woman it was told about.

But understanding it did not make it weigh less.

I sat at that back table feeling the whole room’s soft collective decision to find me slightly embarrassing, and I held my spine straight, and I focused on my son, and I did not yet know that my son was, very quietly, about to make every one of them look directly at what they had spent two years arranging not to see.

I should have known then that something was coming.

He had the stillness of a boy who had already decided.

Chapter 4 — The Speech