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.”

She entered the courtroom wearing a navy suit and pearl earrings, every inch the polished professional woman she had always known how to perform. If you knew nothing else, you might have thought she was there for a board meeting, not to defend herself against allegations of participating in the torture of her own child. Her lawyer sat beside her, a sleek family law specialist with a reputation for making wealthy clients look sympathetic and opponents unstable.

William, seated with Wendell at the opposite table, felt a strange stillness settle over him as he watched her. He had thought there might be grief or rage or residual love. Instead there was only recognition. This was the woman he had built a life around. This was the woman who had stood beside him at Owen’s birth and cried when they laid the baby on her chest. This was also the woman who had told that same child his father would stop loving him if he spoke the truth.

People could contain contradictions large enough to destroy everyone around them. That, too, was part of reality.