That is the strange mercy of raising children alone: the features that might have haunted you become, over years of loving them, simply your children’s faces, not the face of the man who left.

But I had never quite been able to unsee it entirely.

It ambushed me sometimes — Gavin turning his head a certain way over his homework, Clara setting her jaw exactly the way Garrett used to when he’d decided something, Lucas laughing with his whole face the way his father once had before the family cold set into him.

In those moments a ghost would move across my kitchen, and I would feel the old ache, and then one of them would call me Mom and the ghost would dissolve back into my own beloved child.

I had made peace with it.