“I’m coming to talk to you.” But I did not drive to Yvette first.

Before I did anything else — before the confrontation, before the truth, before any of it — I drove my son to my parents’ house, because the first rule, the only rule that mattered before all the others, was that Roger be somewhere warm and safe and loved while the rest of it happened.

My mother opened the door in her robe, surprised to see us at that hour, and then she saw Roger’s bare feet and my white face and she asked no questions at all.

She simply took him inside, and wrapped him in the soft blanket from the back of her couch, and warmed him a glass of milk, and carried him off to the spare room murmuring the same nonsense songs she’d sung to me when I was small.