I realize some readers might be thinking—hold on, what the hell was all that about not wanting to risk your connection with Ashley, or her well-being? What about stopping when your child asks you to stop? It’s hard for me to look back and justify it now, but my thinking at the time was consumed with the overwhelming despair that I was failing Ashley as a mother. I felt I needed to do something to get myself out of my stupor. I needed information. Even if she might be mad or hurt in the short term, should she find out, I went to the meeting with the intention of making myself better in the long run, so I could be the mother she deserved, and the partner Paul needed.

There was something in Paul that just kind of gave up on me, when everything with Kyle and my termination came to light. The only time we spoke about it, he told me that he felt betrayed. That it made him feel like ‘a chump,’ after all of the effort and care he had shown.

I’m done, he said, scrunching up his mouth, and shrugging. I’m just . . . I’m done.

Done with my condition, with my insomnia, with talking about it, with talking to me, with caring. And after everything, I didn’t blame him. I felt a kind of desperation that I find it difficult to put into words without making myself sound crazy, which of course I was in a sense, I had completely tipped over into some sort of manic state, and I knew I had too, and was just trying everything I could to pull myself out of it. But then, the more you flail around trying to heave yourself out of the quicksand of mania, the more manic you seem, and the more manic you are.

When I pulled up at the house on Sequoia Crescent, my first thought was—these people pay for professional landscaping. Their driveway asphalt looked freshly laid. Their home was large, without being ostentatious. As I walked up the front path, with its ground-level lights embedded in the stone, I thought about how people with money bought large homes, but people with real money bought large homes that somehow didn’t look large. I was anxious, and when I get anxious I get gassy, and I let out a truly noxious fart right as I arrived at the door, and had to wait for a full twenty seconds until things had sufficiently abated before I rang the doorbell, and it was just as well that I did as the door was opened almost immediately by a large man with tousled white hair, a tenure-track beard, and a zippered burgundy sweater. His owlish face broke into a broad, inviting smile.