i could feel the heat of her fingers blooming on my skin, a five-pointed star of shame that burned hotter than any coal stove back home in West Virginia. My eyes were wide, and I’m sure they looked terrified, like a deer caught in the blinding glare of a car it never saw coming. I couldn’t blink. I couldn’t breathe.

Then her voice, a shard of ice in the suffocating quiet, twisted the knife. She wasn’t looking at me, but at my son Liam, who stood on the stage across the room. Her face, so perfectly beautiful just moments before, was a mask of practiced hysteria.