You’re destroying a family over a seating chart.” But there was a second folder on that drive, and it had nothing to do with a seating chart.

Six months earlier, Lindsay had left her cloud account logged in on our kitchen tablet.

I hadn’t gone looking.

I’d been checking a flight time when a message from her mother surfaced on the screen — an instruction to keep my children out of the main photographs that night, because they ruined the family aesthetic. I should have closed it.

Instead I scrolled, and I found months of it: messages calling me a useful provider, good for paying off their mortgages; remarks about Cruz’s darker hair, about my mother’s small-town upbringing, about how Sofia was pretty enough but clearly not one of us.

I won’t reproduce the worst of them here, partly because they don’t deserve repeating and partly because a person can only stand to write certain sentences about his own children once.