Something came apart in my chest without making a sound.

And across the table, Lachlan let a small smirk cross his face — there and gone, but I caught it, and it told me everything: he had not won our son with love or care.

He had won him with money, and lawyers, and a strategy worked out well in advance.

I sat there with the wreckage of myself and did not understand, yet, that I was watching a performance, and that the person giving it was the bravest one in the building.

I only understood that my child had looked through me like I was glass.

I want to be honest about what that did to me, because it is the wound the whole rest of the story grows out of, and if you don’t understand the depth of it you won’t understand anything that came after.