When I Got Home From My Night Shift at 6:14 A.M., I Found My Husband in the Guest Room With My Sister While My Five-Year-Old Slept on the Cold Kitchen Floor — I Picked Up My Boy and Left Without Waking Either of Them, and by Sunrise I Understood the Guest Room Was the Smallest and Least Ugly Part of the Truth

I have thought a great deal about my sister since, because she is the hardest part of the whole story to hold — harder, in some ways, than Gideon.

Gideon is simple: a man who saw his own child as an obstacle and his own wife as a mark, and there is a clean, cold clarity in knowing exactly what someone is.

Yvette is not simple.

She did a genuinely terrible thing; she betrayed me in my own home, chose her want over her sister, and looked away from a child so she wouldn’t have to see him.

There is no version where that is forgivable, and I have not forgiven it.