If you and Dad ever got divorced, she said when she was in middle school, I’d never forgive you.

She said it to me, not us.

So I stayed.

I stayed through it all because not only would she hate me if I left, but, in the words of my best friend, he was the most stable thing I’d ever known.

I stayed because, in spite of everything else, I knew he would always be loyal.

Until he wasn’t.

So I left.

Well, to be clear, first I had a nervous breakdown, landed myself in the hospital, spent months and months and months trying to put myself back together, took a sabbatical in the desert, spent more months trying to make sense of it all, then I left.

But in the end I left because it was the only thing left to do.

And somehow I’m still the bad guy.