I had spent those same months so consumed with not noticing, so committed to the comfortable fiction, that I had left a twelve-year-old to notice in my place.

While I was reheating dinners and telling myself that busy meant faithful, Leo had been watching his father’s car turn the wrong way down the wrong streets and doing the terrible arithmetic that no child should ever have to do.

He had protected me, in his way.

He had held the truth quietly, hoping he was wrong, waiting for a version of events that would let him put the notebook away.

And I had been the parent, and he had been the child, and somehow the weight had ended up on his shoulders instead of mine.