I looked at it for a moment before I opened it, this ordinary school notebook, the kind you buy in a pack of three, and some instinct told me that whatever was inside it was going to change the ground under my feet.

I was right.

I opened the cover, and I began to read my son’s small careful handwriting, and I understood that the boy I had been trying to protect from the truth had, in fact, been quietly gathering it, for months, entirely on his own.

There is a particular shame reserved for the parent who discovers that their child has been protecting them, rather than the other way around, and I felt the full weight of it in that kitchen.

I had spent those months carefully keeping my worries from Leo, speaking in a bright voice about his father’s meetings, arranging my face at the dinner table, congratulating myself on shielding him from the tension in the house.