The bag she had brought was packed carefully, with feeding supplies and clean clothes arranged so she could reach them.

Two weeks after giving birth to twins, she had been sent to the house of a woman who did not know her, carrying the beginning of a conversation their father could not face.

I was forty-six.

Julian was twenty-one now.

Those numbers felt impossible together.

My son had been eighteen in my mind for so long that I had not made room for the years he was living elsewhere.

“How long have you known him?”