“I tried for years to get close to his pain, to try to help him heal it, but he always stayed guarded and we’d end up fighting. I even suggested he see a therapist, but he refused. So I left it alone, you know, left him to deal with it himself. But I had it all wrong. I never . . . ever ever ever would’ve guessed that he had a”—her voice breaks up—“a child he was seeing every week for the last fifteen years . . . a child born during our marriage.”

Mom’s pain envelops me like a thick fog. I can’t imagine being married to a man for twenty years and finding out he had a secret child for most of them. I can’t imagine getting that call from the other woman. And who is this other woman? How long was the affair? A night? Five years? I have questions, but there’s no way I’m hitting Mom with them right now.

Mom takes one of her hands off the steering wheel to wipe her eyes.

“I can drive,” I offer.

“No, I’m okay,” she insists.

I grab her free hand and hold it.

“He still loves you, you know,” she says.

As always, here she goes trying to turn the spotlight off her pain, around to mine. “But what about you? Do you think he still loves you?”

She puts both hands back on the steering wheel. “Love is not just some feeling, Carli.”

Her voice isn’t normal. It’s not hard like she’s pissed or high like she’s annoyed, but it’s not normal.

“There’s a deep responsibility to it . . . a deep trust. And no matter how your dad feels, he’s failed to love me.”

It’s defiant. That’s what her voice is. She wipes her eyes again.

“And he can be mad about me divorcing him so quickly all he wants, but there’s no way I will ever be able to trust him again. And I can’t be married to someone I can’t trust. Don’t need time or marriage counseling to tell me that.”

An image of my parents sitting in a room on opposite ends of a light-blue sofa pops into my head. And another one of them sitting closer on the sofa. And then together in the middle of the sofa with Cole and me on either end. “You don’t even want to try?” I ask.

“Try?” she says, her voice going high.