I didn’t, because my pride was wounded, and because every rejection confirmed the thing I was most afraid of, that you simply didn’t want me, or the babies.

So I stopped.

And that was my choice.” She looked at him steadily.

“But I want to be precise about the different kinds of wrong here, Alex, because they matter.

My mistake was stopping when I hit a closed door.

Your mother’s mistake was locking those doors on purpose.

And your mistake, the first one, the one that made all the rest possible, was walking out the door before anyone even had to lock it.” Alex did not argue.

He could not, because every word of it was true, and because he had spent six years not being told true things, insulated by his mother from the truth about his own life, and he was not going to start flinching from it now.