“Mrs. Dalrymple said I asked excellent questions,” she announced.
“I have no doubt.”
“And I told everyone judges have to be brave because grown-ups are weird.”
I laughed so hard I nearly missed the light turning green.
Mark continued, in the months and years after, to orbit our lives rather than inhabit them. He did some of the counseling. He improved in outward ways. He apologized once, but only to the shape of the damage, not to its truth. “Things got messy,” he said in a supervised family session, as though the house had somehow fallen into disorder by itself. Lily accepted what she could from him and built the rest of her understanding elsewhere. Children do that. They patch around absences with whatever sturdier material they can find.
As for me, I stopped asking the wrong questions.
Not why did he leave. That answer turned out to be ordinary and therefore useless: selfishness, vanity, cowardice, the seduction of being admired by someone who had not yet watched him fail. Not how could he do this to us. People do cruel things every day when cruelty seems easier than accountability.