And he had married her, even after—after he had realized—

She was his family. He couldn’t live without them.

The cab dropped him off in front of their house, the modest detached home just a few doors down from her parents’ row house where he had spent so much of his childhood. Two houses that didn’t belong to him anymore—where he’d never really belonged.

He let himself in the front door, placing his keys in the hand-painted ceramic bowl that Amy had made in kindergarten. How many more times would he do that—come into this place, with the family pictures and the framed finger paintings and the warm throw blankets crocheted by Deb Daugherty, such a good mom, such an incredible grandma? The little side table, slightly crooked, that Jason had built at the beginning of his retirement when he didn’t know what to do with himself—all of these things, the things that meant love and togetherness and, Jack had imagined, forever.

Meg was in the kitchen, keeping his dinner warm, and Amy was already in her pajamas, with strawberry jam smeared on her cheeks. He settled into the hard-backed chairs at the table—a table that had seen so many family dinners, three children, and that last, horrible conversation. Meg put a plate in front of him, loaded with her buttery Southern-meets-Irish cooking, and it must have been good.

It tasted like dust.

Amy kicked her feet under the table with the endless energy of a small child staving off her bedtime. “Daddy, will you read to me tonight?”

He smiled down at her. “Sure thing, Ames.”

Jack had fucked up in many ways, but as he helped Amy brush her teeth and wipe the jam from her sticky cheeks, he thought, Yeah, I haven’t screwed up being a dad. She picked out her favorite—and too-often read, for him, but that’s what kids did—picture book, and he remembered—

When Meg first got pregnant, which they’d both wanted so desperately, he’d been gripped by terror at the reality of it. What if he was too...too broken, too filled with poison, too dead inside to properly love a child? What if he were like his father, running away before he could remember him? What if he would be like his mother, disinterested, callous, self-absorbed?

What if he would look at a child of his blood and resent them bitterly because they would never have to live the way that he had, hungry, cold, forgotten? It was a terrible thing to be so afraid of whatever monster might live in him—of the ways in which he had been harmed.