She did not need to see her mother cry on a floor.

She did not need to know, at ten, the word dissipation, or why there had been a private investigator, or what her father had promised a woman named Dagny about a condo in the Seaport.

Those were adult wreckages, and I meant to keep them in the adult rooms.

So I told her only that she’d be having a few nights at her aunt’s, which she loved, and I packed her favorite pajamas and the stuffed rabbit she still won’t admit she sleeps with, and I made it feel like a treat and not an evacuation.

That night I hugged my daughter a beat too long at my sister’s door, and Anwen, who is ten and misses nothing, asked if everything was okay.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” I told her, and for once I believed the thing I was telling her, because I had already decided it would be.