Through the half-open door, I heard voices—soft, broken, vulnerable. And then I heard Ryan’s. He wasn’t with another woman. He wasn’t running from fatherhood. He was running from the nightmares of almost losing me. He confessed to strangers what he couldn’t bring himself to tell me—that every time he looked at Lily, he saw the moment he thought he’d lost his wife. He wasn’t avoiding our daughter because he didn’t love her—he was terrified of the depth of that love and the pain of nearly losing everything in one night.
