My son sobbed the entire drive to his grandmother’s house. “Daddy, please don’t leave me here.” My wife snapped, “You’re babying him.” I left him anyway. Three hours later, a neighbor called. “Your little boy ran to my house shaking. He’s hiding under my bed and won’t stop crying.”

He had met Marsha seven years earlier on a wet September afternoon in a classroom that smelled faintly of old books and coffee. She had enrolled as an auditor in his child development course. Even then there had been something striking about her—beautiful in a clean, severe way, all sharp cheekbones and dark eyes and unwavering eye contact. She had answered questions with confidence. She had challenged him, disagreed with him without hesitation, rolled her eyes at what she called sentimental psychology. She had seemed self-contained, forceful, adult in a way many people only performed. William, who had spent most of his life measuring rooms for danger before speaking, had mistaken that for security. He had mistaken her composure for strength, her distance for self-possession, her contempt for naïveté as proof that she saw through the world’s hypocrisies.

By the time he understood that what he had taken for strength was often just coldness sharpened into habit, they were married. By the time he fully recognized how deeply Marsha admired hardness in other people—how much she believed pain improved character, obedience was virtue, and softness was rot—Owen was already on the way.