He turned the color of a man who’d just realized what he threw away.
Chapter 2: The Thirteen Years He Missed
Let me tell you what my ex-husband, David, didn’t know he was looking at, because the two golds were just the surface, and the real story was the thirteen years underneath them.
David left when the twins were babies. He’d met someone — the woman beside him in that lobby — and he decided, with the clean efficiency of a man who travels light, that a wife and infant twins were weight he no longer wanted to carry. He didn’t fight for custody. He didn’t ask for visitation, not really. He sent a check for a while, erratically, and then those thinned out too, and then he built a whole new family and a whole new life in which, I came to understand, my sons simply did not feature. The last photo he had of them was from their christening because he never took another. He never came to another thing.
So I raised them. Alone, on a single income, through every ordinary heroic thing single parents do and no one sees. The croup night in the ER when I was so tired I cried in the parking lot. The science fairs I stayed up helping with. The birthdays, the concerts, the four thousand dinners, the homework, the fevers, the two boys who needed a father and had instead a mother determined that they would never, ever feel the lack of one as a lack of love.
