For making me spend a single night of my son’s first week of life mounting a defense in my own head against a charge I knew to be a lie.

He had made me a stranger in my own innocence.

He had taken the purest thing I had — the plain fact of my own faithfulness, which should have needed no defending — and forced me to hold it up to the light and inspect it for cracks, and there is a violation in that which the eventual apology could never quite reach.

And underneath the rage, quieter and worse, was the fear I would not say aloud even to Romina: that if the number came back and it were somehow, impossibly, not what I knew it would be — if the universe had arranged some cruel biological joke — I would lose not only my marriage but my children, my name, my whole standing in the world, on the strength of a mark the size of a fingernail.

I knew the test would clear me.

I knew it.