Every Sunday, Weston had called his parents to talk about holiday plans and fake home repairs and how well the kids were doing.
He had never mentioned a divorce.
He had never said Harriet was living in a borrowed apartment out of desperation, or that he paid almost nothing in support, or that he had skipped Emmett’s thirteenth birthday after promising he’d be there.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Blythe asked, her voice cracking.
Harriet took a slow breath.
“Because he’s your son.
It was his job to tell you the truth.”
It was the honest answer, but it was not the whole of it, and in the weeks that followed Harriet would think about the rest.
She had not told Blythe and Harlan for eight months, and the reasons were tangled in a way that shamed her a little to untangle.
Part of it was exactly what she’d said — a stubborn sense that it was not her place to inform two people that their son had become a stranger.
Part of it was pride; there is a particular humiliation in telling the people who raised your husband that he has abandoned you and your children in a borrowed apartment, a humiliation that feels, wrongly but powerfully, like your own failure rather than his.
But underneath both was something harder to admit: for a long time, some part of her had still been protecting Weston.
Fifteen years of marriage does not switch off like a light, even when the man deserves it to.
She had spent a decade and a half in the habit of shielding him — smoothing things over with his parents, making his excuses, carrying his weight so the world would think better of him than he’d earned.