I was keeping them from a man who did not know, because the day he knew, it stopped being a story about what he had done and started being a negotiation about Wednesdays.
As long as I did not tell him, I was the woman he had wronged.
The minute I told him, I was a woman with a contact schedule.
And the other half.
Rory asked me in the August of 2023.
Not the first time any of them had asked — the first
time one of them asked properly, sitting up, with a follow-up question ready.
He was six. He asked whether his dad knew about them.
And I said: “He doesn’t know yet.”
Yet. I have thought about that word about nine hundred times.**
Because that was the truth and it was also a door I was holding shut with my foot, and a six-year-old heard a promise in it, and I knew he had, and I let him keep it for two and a half more years because I was not ready.
