William looked into the rearview mirror. Their eyes met for a fraction of a second. Owen’s face was blotchy and wet, his blond hair plastered to his forehead, and there in his expression was something William could not unsee: not ordinary reluctance, not the manipulative crying of a spoiled child testing boundaries, but terror. Real terror. The kind that widened pupils and hollowed the face. The kind that made the body go rigid, then collapse.
“Maybe,” William began carefully, “maybe we should talk about this again.”
Marsha turned toward him so fast the movement felt like a slap. “Excuse me?”
“I’m saying he’s clearly not okay.”
“He’s fine.”
“He doesn’t look fine.”
“He looks like a child who has learned that if he cries enough, his father will rescue him from every situation that makes him uncomfortable.” Her mouth tightened. “This is why your parenting doesn’t work.”
William inhaled slowly through his nose, the way he did before difficult meetings, before faculty disputes, before situations where every instinct told him to defend himself but experience warned him it would only escalate things. “My parenting?”
“Yes, your parenting.” Marsha’s tone sharpened. “You treat him like he’s fragile. You hover. You ask how he feels every five seconds. You coddle him.”
“He is fragile,” William said. “He’s a child.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
The car went quiet except for Owen’s sniffling and the low drone of tires on asphalt. William could feel the old pattern setting in—the one that had defined so much of his marriage. Marsha would push. He would resist softly, then more firmly, then doubt himself, then pull back to keep the peace. She would accuse him of overreacting, of projecting, of being weak because of his childhood. And sooner or later, exhausted by conflict and never entirely free of the suspicion that maybe she saw something he didn’t, he would give ground.
He hated that pattern. He hated himself most of all inside it.