The Standing She Did Not Know She Had

Either the tenderness was real and he was able to override it in an instant when the family accounting required — which is a kind of monster.

Or the tenderness was never real at all, was a role he had learned to play convincingly because playing it kept me pliant and unsuspecting while the real arrangement was built around me — which is a different kind of monster.

I did not know, lying there, which one Beau was, and I have never entirely decided since.

But I understood, watching him straighten his coat, that both versions ended the same way: with a man who could look at his own newborn daughter and see a line item.

And there is no version of that man I could hand my daughter to.