For the rest of my life, every time you looked at Auggie, there’d be a decision I made in a room you weren’t in.

“And” — and here he stopped for a while — “and you might have said no.

“That’s the one.

You might have said no, and then he lives three more weeks on a ventilator, and I’m the man who tried to stop it.

Or you say yes and it’s ours and I have to live inside that with you.

“So I made it a thing that happened instead of a thing I did.

And once it’s a thing that happened, nobody has to hold it.”