Last night my son h.i.t me and I didn’t cry. This morning I got out the nice tablecloth, served breakfast like on special occasions, and when he came downstairs smiling he said, “So you finally learned your lesson”… until he saw who was waiting for him at my table.

When my son said those words in the kitchen of our house in Savannah, I mistakenly thought it was just another one of his usual tantrums that I had been justifying for far too long. However, that night I realized I was no longer dealing with a confused boy, but with a twenty-three-year-old man who had learned to weaponize his frustration into a direct threat.

Wyatt had always been tall and broad-shouldered, possessing a physical presence that filled a room even when he remained silent. As a small child, he was kind and affectionate, but as a teenager, he began to fill with a deep-seated resentment that poisoned his personality.

First, it was because his father, Harrison, moved to Denver after our divorce, and then it was because he dropped out of college. Later, he couldn’t hold down a job and his girlfriend left him, until eventually, he didn’t even need a specific reason to believe the whole world owed him something.