She sat beside him, sorting mail. “Yes.”
“Why?”
She thought of all the possible explanations and rejected them one by one. Greed. Vanity. Fear. Entitlement. Weakness. The inability to love anything without trying to own it.
“Because sometimes people choose what helps them feel bigger, even when it hurts other people,” she said.
He absorbed that in silence.
Elias, more outwardly steady but inwardly deeper-watered, asked a different question days later. “Did he stop loving us?”
Eleanor set down the book she had been pretending to read. Of all the questions, that one was the cruelest because it asked the mother to define a father’s absence without making it the child’s fault.
“No,” she said finally. “But loving someone and taking care of them well are not always the same thing.”
He nodded, though she could tell he did not fully understand. Perhaps adults do not either.