I did not answer him.

I had learned, somewhere in the preceding week, that there is a kind of person for whom your silence is the only honest reply — that to argue is to pretend you are still two people having a disagreement, when in truth you are a mother holding her children and a man being removed from the room.

So I said nothing.

I turned my face away from him and back down to the two small, warm, breathing miracles in my arms, and I did not look up again, not even when the doors closed behind him and the shouting stopped at last.