“You are.

And I’m his mother.” And then Valerie said the sentence that got repeated around that family for a year: “Liam needed a father.

I don’t need a husband.”

And she closed the door.

Logan backed her up, which is the single largest thing he has ever done.

Paige backed her up.

And Arthur — my father-in-law, who had said perhaps four hundred words to me in thirteen years — apparently sat his wife down at their kitchen table and told her that she had driven off her daughter-in-law, alienated the mother of her grandson, and was three moves from losing the boy as well.

She never admitted anything.