I didn’t want to invite anyone for Thanksgiving. My parents offered to fly in from Arizona, but I told them not to come. I also said that I didn’t want them to come for the trial. I just couldn’t bear them seeing me that way. Stuart’s mother is too ill to travel, and it’s a condition of my bail that I can’t leave the state.

I suggested to Stuart that we treat the holiday like any other Thursday. I have nothing very much to be thankful for this year, after all. He said that he would do whatever I wanted, but then he put his thumb on the scale by offering to do all the cooking.

So it’s just the three of us.

The thought has never been far from my mind that this may be the last Thanksgiving I will spend with my son. Prison is worse than death in that way. Thanksgivings would continue to come, but I’d never be with Jacob.

Although I’ve rejected the idea of jumping bail, suicide has never strayed far from my thoughts. The last way I can achieve freedom, if everything turns against me.

As far as I can tell, Jacob still knows nothing of the hurricane swirling around me. As Stuart toils in the kitchen, my son and I watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, challenging each other to be the first to scream out the name of the character balloons when they appear on-screen. He wins with each character he knows, and I’m surprised how many he does—SpongeBob, Hello Kitty, Pikachu, Thomas the Tank Engine. He thinks Paddington is Winnie the Pooh, but I don’t correct him. To my surprise, he has no idea who Snoopy is, but comes back strong with the Power Rangers, Ronald McDonald, and the prehistoric squirrel from the Ice Age movies.

“Scrat,” Jacob tells me his name.

He’s sitting in my lap, and I’m holding him tight. So tight that he tells me that I’m squeezing him too much. Although I don’t want to, I relax my grip ever so slightly.

I know in this moment that I will not be able to live without Jacob. He is my oxygen, and without him I will suffocate.

Stuart does a lovely job with dinner. The turkey is browned perfectly and juicy. The side dishes look like they should be in a magazine.

He deliberately did not carve the drumstick so that Jacob can eat it like a caveman. My son looks to me for approval. I nod, telling him that because this year Thanksgiving is just the three of us, he can do it that way, but when others are present, he needs to use a fork and a knife.