Alex had spent his early life believing that a family was something you acquired, and secured, and perfected, an achievement, like a merger or a legacy, to be engineered and protected and passed down.

He had wanted the family the way he wanted everything else: as a possession that reflected well on him, a thing that would be there, complete and satisfactory, when he wanted it.

And that fundamental error, the treating of a family as a thing to be obtained rather than a commitment to be kept, was what had allowed him to leave.

Because if a family is an acquisition, then a defective one, a barren wife, a failed conception, can be returned, exchanged, abandoned in favor of a better model.