There is no lower thing a person can do, and he did it without a flicker, laughing, in his mother’s kitchen, and I stood in my bedroom twenty feet from my wedding dress and understood that I had never in my life been in the presence of anything so cold.

And then, because I am my children’s mother and cold is a thing I know how to answer with something colder, I stopped shaking and started to think.\n\nChapter 4 — Three Years of Believing

To understand what those words did to me, you have to understand the life they were aimed at.

I was forty-three, and I was raising three children on my own.

My son, Ben.