The whole room seemed to hold still as my eight-year-old walked out from behind the table and toward the bench — not running, not crying, but walking, his narrow shoulders squared back with a steadiness that stopped the air in my throat.
I reached for him and missed.
Some instinct told me not to call out, that whatever was about to happen was his to do.
It is a strange and terrible thing to watch your small child walk toward the most powerful adult in a room and decide you cannot stop him.
Every cell in my body wanted to lunge, to gather him back, to spare him whatever was coming — because my entire job for two years had been to stand between Rory and harm, to absorb everything so that none of it reached him.
And here he was, stepping out from behind the shield I had made of myself, walking directly into the danger I had spent everything to keep off of him.
I did not understand yet what he was doing.
I only knew that his face wore an expression I had never seen on it, a calm that did not belong to a child, and that some deep part of me recognized it even as it frightened me.
It was the same expression I saw in the mirror on the mornings I decided, one more time, not to give up.
He had learned it somewhere.