David’s version of collapse was less articulate and more visible.
He lost ten pounds in a month. He stopped wearing the baseball cap. His coworkers noticed he seemed absent, slower.
At home he oscillated between desperate openness and old evasive habits, confessing one detail only after being confronted with another. Linda discovered that he had created a separate email address to communicate with Nia about child support and visits. Not to hide romantic messages, he insisted, but because he “didn’t know how to keep the conversations separate.” Linda stared at him and said, “You built a secret email address for your secret child and you still think the problem is compartment names.”
Despite everything, Cam kept existing in ordinary child-sized ways.
He lost a tooth. He developed a sudden fear of thunderstorms. He wanted to wear rain boots on sunny days because the yellow ones made him “run faster.” Nia texted photos to David sometimes because she was trying to transition from ghostlike, hidden fatherhood into a documented arrangement that could not depend on her mood or his courage. Linda knew about the texts because all communication was now visible under the disclosure rules Jason had insisted on.
The first time Linda saw a picture of Cam grinning with a gap-toothed smile and chocolate frosting on his chin, she felt a spear of grief she could not even categorize. This boy was innocent, vibrant, alive. And he existed because David had made choices that simultaneously created a child and detonated a marriage.
By October, Linda asked to meet Cam again, which surprised everyone including herself.
She did not want to mother him, absorb him, or perform sainthood. She wanted the truth to stop being abstract. So Nia agreed to a brief neutral meeting at a park in the next town while David remained across the lawn on a bench, present but not central. Linda brought a little plastic dinosaur puzzle from the museum gift shop on impulse.
Cam studied her carefully for the first few minutes, then asked if she liked the Ferris wheel too. Linda answered yes. He nodded seriously, as if this information confirmed something important.