Sarah Miller, barely spoke — and then, when asked to draw his family, drew a house with two separate front doors, me standing at one and his father at the other, and himself, small, alone, standing in the yard in the middle.

I saw that drawing and I had to leave the room.

Because I was in a courthouse fighting over property, and my ten-year-old son was somewhere much harder, fighting not to be torn in two.

That drawing reorganized my whole understanding of what the divorce was.

Up to then I had let myself think of it in the terms the lawyers used — assets, shares, custody percentages, the vocabulary of who gets what.

And here was my son’s version of the same events, rendered in crayon, and in his version there were no assets at all.