My own son turned on me so severely, so terminally. My own flesh and blood—but then, no. His flesh. His blood. My seed. He carries proteins encoded by my body, true, but he is not me in mind or form, and Elizabeth is impermeable. She and I are not halves of a whole. We are the color made by overlapping circles in our Venn diagram, a color that exists only through each other. I can connect to her, put myself inside her—I can enter her and still not crawl around inside her head. She is separate from me, divided by skin, thought, fantasy, history—a whole her-before-me I’ll never know. We tell stories. We learn each other through anecdotes and confessions, but as with her precious books, I visualize the scene in the theater of my mind without ever knowing if my vision matches hers. I see the truck, the sister, the school, the long-dead best friend, the ex-husband, the thesis, and what I see is little more than a police sketch of her memory—which is, itself, once removed from an objective reality, if one exists. The only things I know about her, the only things I know for sure, are the things we share: a dance, a dinner, a kiss. But even these are watered-down wishes, because is she even thinking of me when we kiss?

I look hard at my son, trying to see what Elizabeth could possibly see—and only now, yes, in this terrible lighting, maybe he could remind me of me, after all. I’ve always distrusted people who say he takes after his father, the same ones who called him my spitting image when he was a newborn. They say those things to be polite, but Jonah doesn’t think like me or see this world like I do, and these differences are by design. I raised him to have different architecture than mine. I raised him in a loving household, and when the love was lost, Vanessa and I aimed for two loving households. Jonah doesn’t have a clue what it feels like to lose a mother, or to have a father whose demands were impossible to satisfy. This ignorance is my gift to him.

Now, though, as I study his face, I spot the resemblance I never noticed before. He does have my features: my dark brow, my strong chin, my hairline, no question. I say, “You and Elizabeth watched Nick fall to his death, and you let him rot out there for three days.”

Jonah rocks the back of his head against the door. “This wasn’t easy for us, Dad. I kept saying we should do something, but she said we had to remove ourselves and let it unfold how it would’ve unfolded if we’d never been there. It’s like she thought if she ignored it, somehow the whole thing would never have happened.”