Standing in that kitchen at twenty-eight, I wasn’t built for it either.

Nobody is.

You are not handed some special aptitude for fatherhood along with the child; you build it, clumsily, in the doing, out of failure and love and repetition.

Warren looked at the enormous unbuilt thing and decided he couldn’t, and left.

I looked at the same enormous unbuilt thing and was every bit as unqualified, and stayed, and built it anyway.

That’s all the difference there ever was between us.