My hand was shaking so hard I couldn’t even grip the door handle of my Buick. I sat in that gravel parking lot in Dayton for forty minutes with the engine running and the heater blasting.

Through the glass lobby window, I could see a grown man rocking back and forth in a plastic chair. He rocked the exact same way he did when he was five years old. It was Marcus. My son. And I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years.

Let me back up a bit so you understand how a father does something like this. I’m not a monster, or at least, I didn’t think I was back then. When Marcus was little, it was just the two of us after my first wife passed. He was diagnosed with severe autism when he was just a toddler. He didn’t talk much, and when he got overwhelmed, he would scream and pace for hours.

But we had our little routine, you see. Every single night, we would sit on the living room rug and play with his favorite green plastic T-Rex. He loved that silly toy. He would line up his other little plastic figures in a perfect row, and if one was even slightly out of place, he’d get terribly upset.

I learned how to manage it. I loved him, bless his heart, and I adjusted my whole life around his needs. It was hard, sure, but he was my boy. I figured we would always have each other.

Then I met Brenda. I was lonely, and she was warm and lively, and she made me feel like a young man again. We got married when Marcus was twelve. I really thought we could be a happy family.

But Brenda wasn’t used to the noise. She wasn’t used to the locks we had to keep on the kitchen cabinets so Marcus wouldn’t hurt himself. She couldn’t handle the way he would meltdown if his dinner plate wasn’t the blue one.

By the time Marcus turned fourteen, things had gotten really bad. Brenda started sleeping in the guest room. One night, I found her sitting on the kitchen floor crying, with her head in her hands.

She looked up at me with tears streaming down her face. “Arthur, I can’t do this anymore,” she said.

“We just need more time,” I told her. “He’s just going through a phase.”

“It’s him or me,” she said. Her voice was very quiet, and honestly, that made it feel so much worse. “I love you, but I’m losing my mind here.”

I’ll be honest with you. I chose her quiet over my own son. I told myself a big fat lie to make it easier to sleep at night. I told myself the group home in Dayton had professionals who knew what they were doing. I told myself he would have more structure there, and that it was the best thing for him.