He still came to see Leo and Luna.

He learned how to warm bottles at three in the morning, how to swaddle Luna so she would stop fighting sleep, how to hold Leo against his chest when he got colicky.

He was not a bad father.

That was never the question.

The question was whether I could spend the rest of my life beside a man whose first instinct had always been to survive his mother instead of stopping her.

I couldn’t.

We divorced the following year.

We agreed on a parenting plan.

He kept his distance from his family and, to his credit, never once asked me to forgive what happened.

He knew some things are too ugly to be repackaged as a lesson and moved past.

People still have opinions.

Some say I should have saved the marriage because Adrian stood beside me when it mattered most.

Some say the only reason Victoria dared that hospital-room stunt was because he had spent years teaching her I would stay polite while she pushed farther and farther.

All I know is this: hours after my body was cut open to bring my children into the world, another woman tried to take one of them because she thought I was too weak to stop her.

She was wrong.

And whether leaving Adrian made me unforgiving or simply honest depends on who is telling the story.