His father had once come home with a fever and insisted on repairing a broken fence before resting.

Callum, then a young boy, watched him stumble through the work.

When his mother asked him to stop, his father laughed and said real men didn’t leave jobs unfinished.

“I think I turned that sentence into a rule,” Callum said.

“I thought the people who counted on me would stop respecting me if I admitted I couldn’t do something.”

I listened.

I didn’t want to transform every failure of our marriage into somebody else’s fault, but it helped to understand the beliefs he’d absorbed without questioning them.