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

For location.

For the piece on the board he’d lost track of.

He did not, in that first raw second, reach for his son at all — because his son, I would learn within the hour, had never really been a son to him.

He’d been a prop.

And you don’t ask whether a prop is warm.

You ask where it went.

Chapter 4 — Daddy Told Me to Wait

Roger stirred in the back seat and murmured, still half in sleep, “Mommy?”