“Yes,” she said. Marshall reached for his phone to show her pictures of Spencer and my husband, but she got up and walked after me, into the kitchen, talking. “He was an accident. Geoff. I was only nineteen. Adam was my professor. Such a stupid cliché, except I really did fall in love with him, and then I was pregnant. His wife kicked him out. That means he didn’t pick me. I didn’t think about it that way at the time. But she kicked him out, so I got him. Like, by default. Just like I got Geoff.” I was washing out one of her filthy glasses. She picked a pill bottle and dumped a couple of small white tablets, as innocuous as aspirin, into her hand. The glass I had was full of suds, so she tossed the pills into her mouth and dry-swallowed. She kept on talking, her volume rising with every fast, slurred word. “My whole life here is pretty much an accident. I got this house, and her husband, and dresses like yours if I shop off-season, but sometimes I wished I’d never had a baby. That’s true. I’m not allowed to say that, because it makes me sound awful. But it’s true. There were days I wished I was single again or in school and not a mom.” She set the pill bottle down and pressed her hands hard into her head, Marshall’s waiting questions forgotten, her words slurring and her shoulders shaking. “Not most of the time. Most of the time, I loved him so, so much. But on bad days, when he was crabby or tired, or I was, I might wish him away, so I must be being punished. It’s my fault. I wished it, and now he’s gone.”

Marshall had risen, but he seemed helpless in the face of this storm. He shook his head at me, and I felt it was permission. Permission to be, if not myself, then at least human. I took her in my arms. She was brittle and small and shaking.

“Every mother has those days. Every mother. And you loved him, and you didn’t mean it, and this is not your fault. Someone bad took him. It’s their fault. Not yours, no matter what you did or thought or said.” I wasn’t speaking to her alone, I realized. I was saying these words for myself as well.

She clung to me like a drowning person. “Is he your only son?”

“Yes,” I said. “My only son. So please, I know this is hard. But for the sake of both our boys, can you look at some pictures?”

She nodded, clutching my arm. “Stay close? I’m scared to look.”