“Do you know what you’ve done to him?” he continues, the force of his emotions causing his voice to tremble. “He’s eight, and he now has to deal with the knowledge that he stabbed his own mother. That he nearly killed you. He’s just a kid, for Christ’s sake. How’s he supposed to handle that? With everything else going on in his fucked-up head, how the hell is he ever supposed to deal with that?”

I don’t know what to say.

“I thought you’d died. I got the call, and the way the emergency room nurse was talking … I raced all the way here thinking you were dead. That Evan had murdered you. Then I run into the emergency room, and the police have a million questions and the doctors have a million questions. I can’t even see you; you’ve already been whisked away to the operating room. And Evan’s shackled to a hospital bed. They’ve got him cuffed and everything. My son. My little boy…”

Michael’s voice breaks. He turns away from me, walks toward the wall, and stares at it for a bit.

“I had to call Darren,” he says at last, referring to an old college friend who’d become an attorney. “I had to get legal advice for Evan. That’s where we are with things, Victoria.”

“He didn’t mean—” I try again.

Michael whirls around. “Shut up. Just shut up. I don’t care that you’re hurt. I don’t care that you almost died. I want to hurt you worse, Victoria. I want to slap you until you realize once and for all that your denial is destroying our son. Evan did mean to hurt you. He intentionally stole that goddamn knife out of the drying rack. He cleverly slipped it inside the fabric on the underside of the sofa, where you wouldn’t find it. And he carefully retrieved it during an opportune moment, just so he could drive it through your ribs.”

“How do you know all that? How can you possibly know?”

“Because he told me.”

I stare at him, slack-jawed, disbelieving.

“He’s broken. He answered my questions by rote. There’s no light in his eyes. He stabbed you, but he broke himself. And I don’t know if we’ll get him back. Sure this was better than an institution, Vic?”

The bitterness of his words hurts, just as he intends. I feel the full force of his helplessness. The buried rage from all the times I overrode him, shut him out of the parenting process because I didn’t agree with his solutions, couldn’t let go of my own notions of what was best for my child. I’m the nurturer. Michael, the fixer. We were doomed from the start.