I stood there for a moment, unable to believe it was happening, waiting for one of them to take it back, to soften, to become again the parents I had known.

Neither of them did.

My mother sat frozen with her hand pressed over her mouth.

My father would not look at me at all now; he had turned his face to the window as though I had already gone, as though looking at me directly might undo whatever terrible resolve he was holding on to.

And I understood, at last, that they meant it, that there was nothing left to say, and that the only thing to do now was to go.

I have replayed that scene ten thousand times, the slammed chair, the terrible word, the two frozen faces, and for ten years I read it exactly one way: as the moment my father chose his own comfort over his own child.