By the second day, a social worker had quietly stopped by to ask, gently, what the plan was for the baby — a routine question, she said, whenever a father leaves like that. I told her the plan was that this baby had a mother standing three feet away who wanted her more than anything in the world, and that the rest would sort itself out. I believed it when I said it. I just didn’t yet know what “the rest” actually involved.
At the time, I believed exactly what Claire believed — that Daniel had looked at his daughter’s diagnosis and simply couldn’t handle it. That he was a coward, but at least his cowardice made a kind of sense. A birth defect. A scared new father. An ugly, human, explainable failure.
Three days later, standing in my own kitchen, I found out the truth was so much worse than that.
