“We’ll get whatever tests are necessary,” I said.

“But I am not going to treat my child like a corporate liability while he’s fighting for his life in a plastic box.” And I heard, as I said it, how strange the sentence would have sounded coming from the man I had been six months earlier — a man for whom nearly everything, in the end, had been a liability to be managed or an asset to be maximized, including, I could see now, his own marriage.

Damian was not wrong to raise the legal question; it was his job, and one day I would sign the appropriate forms and confirm what I already knew in my chest.

But I had spent my whole life letting the legal question, the careful question, the business question, go first, ahead of the human one, and I had just watched where that habit led.