And a four-pound baby closed his hand around my finger and it fell away in an instant, the whole armored apparatus of it, revealing underneath not weakness but the thing the armor had been hiding all along, which was simply a man’s ordinary, enormous, terrifying capacity to love.

That is what I understood, kneeling on that hospital floor with my finger in an incubator and tears I could not stop running down my face: that the hardness I had mistaken for my strength had actually been my prison, a shell I had grown so thick and worn so long that I had forgotten there was anything alive inside it.

And it did not take a catastrophe to crack it, in the end, or an act of will, or years of effort.

It took the grip of a hand smaller than my thumbnail, offered without judgment or condition by a person who did not know or care what I had built or what I was worth.