“You weren’t going to ruin your life for her, Alex,” she said, in the reasonable, loving tone she used for her most destructive pronouncements.

“A man needs an heir.” It is a terrible thing, what a parent can do to a grown child who has never fully separated from them, how a mother’s voice can install itself so deep in a son’s mind that he mistakes it for his own.

Alex was a successful man, a partner at a law firm, a person of authority in the world.

And in the one room that mattered most, he was still a boy trying to earn his mother’s approval, and his mother had told him that his wife was an obstacle to his legacy, and some part of him, to his lasting shame, had believed her.