Afterward he asked for a photograph with both his parents.

Joe and I stepped to either side of him, and we smiled, not as some picture-perfect family, not pretending the past hadn’t happened, but as three people who had come through a broken story without pretending it had never broken.

“I wanted that photo,” Tommy told me later, “to remind myself I don’t have to choose a fake version of my life.” I go by Bella now.

Not Mrs.