What he could not do, what he has not been able to do for six months, was come home, and look at you and at Lily, and say out loud that the man who had spent his whole life saving everyone else was losing control of his own body.

He could face losing his career.

He could not face you seeing him lose himself.” David let that sit between us a moment, and I understood that he had spent six months watching his friend make exactly that impossible choice, over and over, every single morning.

I stood there with that terrible signature in my hands, and I understood, at last, the shape of the loneliness my husband had been living inside of, alone, for half a year.

Think of what that signature had cost him, and think of him signing it with no one beside him.