I do not think I knew.

I want to say that carefully rather than defensively: I do not believe that on the nineteenth of June 2014 I had any idea there was a child, because if I had known, my mother’s box would not have mattered — nothing would have been hidden from me, I would simply have been a man who abandoned a son, and I do not believe I am that.

What I think happened is this.

I was seven months out of a marriage.

I was thirty-five and I was working a hundred hours a week specifically so that there would never be an hour in which I had to sit still.

And a woman handed me a piece of paper with my ex-wife’s name on it at a fuel island, and something in my chest went, and I made a decision in about a second and a half that I did not experience as a decision at all.

I wrote don’t so that I would not have to hold it in my head.

It is the same second and a half as the dish of vegetables at my mother’s table.

It is the identical motion.

See a thing coming that will cost something, put it down, pick up a task.