She told me I was overreacting, in the same breath she used to promise she’d do better — she could never quite decide whether there was nothing to forgive or everything, and the wobble between the two told me more than either claim.

She told me I couldn’t do this to the children, as though I were the one who’d sat them behind a pillar.

And I felt, listening to her, a great and final tiredness, because I had heard all of it before, in smaller versions, after smaller betrayals, and I had always let it work.

The promises were real, in the moment she made them; that was the trap.

She meant them every time, and then her mother would call, and the meaning would evaporate, and I’d be back where I started, having forgiven a thing that was about to happen again.

I was not going to raise my children inside that cycle.