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.”

He drove home in a fog thick enough to feel medicinal, like his mind was trying to numb itself before the pain fully registered. At a stoplight two miles from Sue’s house, he nearly turned around. At a gas station he almost pulled over to call and say he was coming back for Owen. He did neither. Instead he drove the rest of the way home under a sky turning pale gold at the edges and parked in front of the small colonial he had once felt proud to buy because it symbolized stability. A home with a fixed mortgage, a fenced yard, a swing set. Proof, he had thought, that he had built something different from the rootless, temporary life that made him. Proof that he could give his child permanence.

Inside, the house felt wrong immediately. Too quiet. The usual scatter of blocks and crayons in the living room had been cleaned away that morning because Marsha hated clutter. Owen’s sneakers sat by the door, one tipped over. A plastic dinosaur lay on the kitchen floor where it had been left after breakfast. William picked it up and set it on the counter, then stared at it for several seconds as though he had forgotten what objects were for.