My phone is already buzzing with work email as I rush Ethan through his morning routine. Get up. Get dressed. For the love of God, brush your teeth and hair. In none of his eight short years has my son ever been a morning person, and I’ve never been the most patient of mothers, not even when I didn’t have a boss clocking the second I step off the elevator.

Not that stay-at-home moms don’t have plenty of stress, but at least then Ethan and I were united in it, members of the same team tiptoeing around the eggshells Andrew left lying all over the house. But this is the habit we’ve fallen into these past six months, ever since the separation. Ethan dallies and I nag.

“Come on, baby, we gotta go.”

His hair is still sticking up where it was pressed against his pillow. His T-shirt is stained and wrinkled, which means he probably plucked it from the dirty pile on the floor. My son is an unapologetic slob. He’s uncoordinated and more than a little awkward looking. His ears are too big and his curls are too fickle and his glasses, constantly clouded with fingerprints, never seem to sit straight on his nose.

But I love him with everything inside of me—not despite all his quirks but because of them. If there’s one thing Andrew taught me, it’s that you can’t love only pieces of a person. You have to love all of them, even the ugly parts.

I hustle Ethan down the stairs, down the cramped hallway and out the back door. Our tiny ranch is not much, but divorce is expensive, and every time my attorney thinks we’re getting close, Andrew comes back with another ridiculous ultimatum. The antique side table we bought on our honeymoon. A pair of crystal candlesticks he broke ages ago. The negatives for Ethan’s baby pictures. As long as it’s not Ethan he wants, I give in to his every demand.

Ethan stops in front of the car, still half-asleep. “What are you waiting for? Get in.”

He doesn’t move. I check the time on my cell—six-twenty-seven.

“Ethan.” When there’s no response, I give his shoulder a little jiggle. “Come on, sweetie. Get in the car. Otherwise you’ll miss the bus.”

Which leaves in exactly thirty-three minutes, from a parking lot across town. Today’s destination: Dahlonega, an early gold rush town an hour north of Atlanta. Ethan’s class will be traipsing through mines two hundred feet under the ground, panning for gold and semiprecious stones, sleeping in a cabin under the stars. When he brought the permission form home from school last month, I thought it was an April Fools’ joke. What kind of teacher takes a busload of second graders on an overnight trip on purpose?

“But we do it every year,” Miss Emma assured me when I questioned her. “We stay at a YMCA summer camp facility so it’s perfectly safe. One teacher

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