But the hope had been real, and that hope is the whole difference between a father protecting his child and a man relishing a war.

Chapter 11 — The Dream He Let Go

In that moment, watching my husband’s face, I understood something about him that I had not fully grasped in three years of marriage: that at some point, quietly and without telling me, he had let go of a dream.

For as long as I had known him, Caleb had carried the particular hope that difficult parents plant in their children, the stubborn, tender, mostly hopeless hope that this time, this holiday, this gesture, might finally be the one that softened his mother’s heart, that turned her into the grandmother Chloe deserved.

He had made excuses for her for years.