There was no gap, no flicker of surely not, no instinct to reconcile the thing he was seeing with the nine years of the woman standing in front of him.

He went from weeping joy to cold verdict in the time it takes to unbutton an onesie.

And a verdict that fast is not really a conclusion at all.

It is a door that was already open.

Somewhere in him, I understood, the belief that I could betray him had been sitting fully formed and waiting, needing only a pretext to walk through, and a birthmark had been pretext enough.

You do not arrive at certainty that quickly about a person you truly know.