He knew he could allude to Rachel’s craziness, her anger, her tantrums, her unwillingness to immerse herself in her children’s lives—he could say things like “I mean, I’m sure you noticed that she never came to STEM Night?”—but he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to undermine Rachel’s status at school out of an old sense of protectiveness that he couldn’t quite shake. She was a monster, yes, but she had always been a monster, and she was still his monster, for she had not yet been claimed by another,
