I made a nonreligious confession to Elliot Barlow and Em. I sent them my never-ending Loge Peak screenplay—“too much voice-over” was all I said about it, in my covering letter. I didn’t tell those two that I considered calling it Breakfast at the Jerome—the snowshoer and Em hated Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the cult celebrity of Truman Capote. Those two said Capote was a fake; they believed he’d ruined Breakfast as a title, for eternity.

“Overkill with the voice-over, but at least you didn’t call it Breakfast at the Jerome—just don’t,” Mr. Barlow’s letter began. When it was possible, the little English teacher would begin with the writing. Eventually, I knew, the snowshoer would circle back to the heart of the matter. “Everyone discovers it’s easier to get married than it is to be married, Adam,” Elliot wrote me. “Not everyone can separate and share a child in an exemplary way. Here’s hoping a good writer and a good editor can get this part right—the breakup is what couples with kids get wrong.”

Molly had said as much to me. I’d told Molly, but not my mom, how badly I’d behaved in Aspen. “At this point, Kid, it doesn’t matter how bad a husband you’ve been, or if Grace was the wrong wife for you to begin with,” Molly said. “It’s the next part you two have to do right—Matthew is the only part that matters now, Kid.”

That September of 1995, Matthew was still in preschool. Since Grace and I doubted we would be living together by the following fall, we didn’t know where Matthew might start kindergarten. I kept thinking I should tell Grace everything—I knew I had to pay for it. But I’d withheld too much to imagine telling her all of it. How would telling her help us to stay focused on Matthew? I could always think of a logical basis for my lies of omission.

“It seems to me you are paying for it—you definitely will pay for it, eventually,” Em told me. “Grace will end up knowing everything, you know—you might as well start somewhere,” she added. “One day, Matthew will want to know who his grandfather is—if only for the medical history. You wanted to know who your father was, didn’t you?” Em asked me. “You’re a melodrama of your own making—you’re not telling this story, you know. You’re in it,” Em told me.

That September, my mother found a tiny spot of blood in her panties. “I’ve been trying to tell you, smarty-pants, there’s something going on—I’m not having my first period all over again, not in my seventies,” she said to Molly, showing her the blood.

“It was like she knew it all along, Kid—it was never about her having a potbelly,” Molly told me.