I’ve been indicted for grand larceny and assigned a lawyer by the state, though I don’t feel I need one. I already know I’m going to plead guilty. But Todd put his foot down—he says it’s essential to have legal counsel regardless of your plea.

Heather has called me several times since the night I moved out, but I can’t bring myself to pick up the phone. I know the kids will be home soon for Thanksgiving, and I know we need to tell them something about what’s going on, but the idea of even being in the same room as Heather makes my blood boil.

Most nights, lying in Todd’s spare bedroom alone in the dark, I miss Skye so much I can’t sleep. Some mornings I roll over groggily and reach for her body next to mine, a few seconds passing before reality hits me like a punch in the gut. Skye is not in bed with me. Skye will never again be in bed with me. Skye is gone. I’ve lost the woman I love, and I’m going to prison. Again.

I’ve accepted that I’m going to prison. My lawyer, a public defender named Brian Dunne, says my sentence might just be a couple years, but that it could be longer. He’ll know more after he speaks with Skye’s attorney before the plea hearing. There isn’t any way around a prison sentence, and I refuse to plead innocent. I’m not innocent. But when I get out, I’m going to find a way to live a better life. To be the best father I can possibly be for the three incredible humans that are somehow, magically, my children.

Maybe I’ll even find love again. Great love, the kind Skye showed me, the kind I never experienced with Heather. What Heather and I had—what I mistook for love all those years—was a naive, dangerous kind of loyalty.

Since I moved out, I’ve been going to AA meetings five days a week. It was Brian’s idea—he said it could make me look more sympathetic at the plea hearing—but it’s been both humbling and empowering. I wanted to go to AA all those years ago, after I got out of the Metropolitan Correctional Center, but Heather was turned off by the whole thing, so I never did. Ironically, AA has made me realize the unhealthy degree of power I granted Heather over my choices. Exploiting my guilt became her strongest weapon. She never understood that my addiction ran deeper than using drugs and alcohol; she never accepted my identity as an addict. She wanted that part of my makeup to simply disappear, by sheer force of will. But Skye did accept that piece of me. We forged a connection that was built from our mutual affirmation of each other’s interior worlds, wounded parts and all. That’s why the love I felt for her was so much deeper and more freeing than anything I’d ever had with Heather.

Today I finally mailed the letter I’d been drafting to Skye for weeks. The kindest thing is probably to let her hate me—hating someone is uncomplicated, a relatively easy and quenching use of energy. But—perhaps selfishly—I want her to know that I love her. I want her to carry on with her life knowing that, for what it’s worth, our love wasn’t a sham. That’s why I decided to send her the Moleskine along with my letter.

Part of the Moleskine, anyway. I had to remove the sections implicating Heather, but in a fit of blind hope, I figured sharing some of the truth was better than none.

Now that the package is in transit, I’m less confident. Maybe I’m just an imbecile who thinks the girl whose life I ruined will appreciate receiving my old shredded Moleskine in the mail, missing pages and all.

Thanksgiving comes, and with it a cold front sweeping southern Connecticut. The morning after the holiday, I wake up in my old house for the very last time. I’m on the living room couch, and through the windows I see a white blanket of snow coating the earth. I’ve always loved waking up to snow, how it makes the world appear so peaceful. Untouched. A clean slate.

But not today.

Your mom and I have decided to take some time apart, I’d explained to Garrett, Hope, and Maggie over pumpkin pie the evening before. I’ve been staying with Todd while we figure it out. Please know that we love you three more than anything, and that this is not remotely your fault.

Heather, stiff as a board next to me, had chortled and veered off script. Your father seems to have gotten himself into some legal trouble. The next word was a whisper, under her breath. Again.

It had been a terrible night; Garrett was stoic, but the girls were full of tears and confusion and begged me to sleep on the sofa instead of going back to Todd’s.

I wake up with a pain in the middle of my back and clean the whole kitchen. I make coffee and wait for the kids to get up so I can say goodbye. As Garrett, Hopie, and Mags stumble downstairs, three caffeine-dependent young adults, I realize they’re not kids at all. In a stupor of pride that they’re mine, that I created them, I watch them fix their coffees. There’s Garrett, with his long, lean build and sleepy eyes, the same blue color as my own. Hope has those little freckles on her nose and her honey-brown curls, the hair she’s always battled. I hate that she doesn’t know how beautiful she is. And then there’s Maggie, my baby, the spitting image of her mother. In certain lights, the resemblance is more than I can handle. It takes me back in time. I am in awe of the three of them, of these perfect creatures that are half of me.

Imagining how they’re going to feel when they discover the full truth of what I’ve done—when they find out I’m going to prison for it—is more than I can stand. It’s my whole heart gone. Even if I wanted to tell them the truth, I can’t. I can’t tell anyone. Heather has me backed into a corner.

I will my mind to a state of blankness when I hug them goodbye. My throat is tight and there’s no way to edge out the pain. I tell them I’ll call later. I say we’ll make a plan to grab dinner or see a movie before the weekend is over. But their sadness is far less discernible after a good night’s sleep; the girls’ faces are dry, and my children nod ambiguously and watch me leave the house as if they’re not sure they know me at all.

I’ve borrowed Todd’s car—a leased Ford Mustang—and on the drive back to his condo I feel so depressed I can barely stand it. I want to stop in for a Scotch at a gritty-looking bar on the way—I can almost taste the chemical bite of the liquor on my tongue, the way it would numb the horror inside me so efficiently, so quickly. But it’s a scar, not a scab, and I keep on driving.

Rain begins to fall on the roof of the Mustang, and I do what I always do lately when I find myself craving a drink. I let myself think about Skye’s sunny face, about the easy happiness that was waking up next to her on three hundred mornings, those precious moments between sleep and awake before the guilt and panic crept in, that sacred state when all I knew was the safe integrity of loving her.

Chapter Forty-Six

Heather

Dear Dr. K,

Everything changed in 2006, the year Facebook grew in popularity. Looking back, I was probably among the first of Generation X to start using it.

I was working part-time at a boutique in downtown New Haven called the Kitchen Kettle, just to bring in some extra cash. Burke had been bugging me to finish my degree already and get a “real” job, but I’d told him countless times that wasting money on my education when we had three children to think about made zero sense. Besides, I didn’t mind my gig at the Kitchen Kettle. The store was usually slow—because who in New Haven shops for high-end kitchenware?—and I often spent my shifts reading glossy magazines behind the counter or listening to the gossip of whichever hyper-emotional high school girl was also working that day.

My sixteen-year-old colleague LeeAnn first introduced me to the world of Facebook. She was utterly consumed with the website, always using the store computer to log in to her account and update her photos and stalk boys she liked. I watched LeeAnn obsessively check the little red notifications that appeared in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen and couldn’t believe such a platform existed.

“God, I hope my son isn’t on here,” I commented one afternoon while LeeAnn was poring through photos of a guy she’d made out with over the weekend.

“Let’s look him up and see,” LeeAnn replied. “What’s his name?”

“Garrett. Garrett Michaels. But he’s only thirteen.” I watched nervously as she typed his name into the search box, three profiles for Garrett Michaels appearing in the results.

“Any of these him?” LeeAnn snapped her gum loudly.

I peered at the square profile photos of the other Garrett Michaelses of the world, relieved when I didn’t see my son’s face. I shook my head.

“Well, it’s only a matter of time,” LeeAnn assured me. “Facebook is blowing up. It used to be just college kids, but now everyone’s getting on it. Some boys are kinda late to the party. What else is new.”

I scratched my chin. “So you can just search anyone’s name and see if they have a profile?”

LeeAnn nodded lazily. “Yup.”