My employer received anonymous messages questioning my honesty, and my contract quietly was not renewed.
The reference I’d counted on evaporated; calls stopped being returned.
Then the housing began — a landlord who had seemed glad to have us suddenly discovering a problem with our lease, then another, then another, each of us moving a little farther down and a little farther out, until I understood, slowly and with a sick certainty, that the moves were not bad luck.
Someone was paying for them.
He never left fingerprints.
That was the genius and the horror of it.
Every individual blow could be explained away as ordinary misfortune, and only when you stepped back and saw them all together did the pattern resolve into what it was: a man with money methodically closing every door in my life, one at a time, until the only door left open was the one marked surrender your son. He did not want to hurt me for its own sake.
He wanted to starve me down to a point where giving up Rory would feel like relief.
He had nearly managed it.
What he had failed to account for — what men like Lyle always fail to account for — was that a mother at the bottom is not the same as a mother who has given up.