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.”

William inhaled slowly through his nose, the way he did before difficult meetings, before faculty disputes, before situations where every instinct told him to defend himself but experience warned him it would only escalate things. “My parenting?”

“Yes, your parenting.” Marsha’s tone sharpened. “You treat him like he’s fragile. You hover. You ask how he feels every five seconds. You coddle him.”

“He is fragile,” William said. “He’s a child.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

The car went quiet except for Owen’s sniffling and the low drone of tires on asphalt. William could feel the old pattern setting in—the one that had defined so much of his marriage. Marsha would push. He would resist softly, then more firmly, then doubt himself, then pull back to keep the peace. She would accuse him of overreacting, of projecting, of being weak because of his childhood. And sooner or later, exhausted by conflict and never entirely free of the suspicion that maybe she saw something he didn’t, he would give ground.

He hated that pattern. He hated himself most of all inside it.