And if you want to know what I think, I will tell you, and if you don’t, I won’t, and I need you to pick which of those you want before I say another word.”

She thought about it for a bit.

And she said: “I don’t want to know what you think.”

And I said, “Okay.”

And that is the single hardest thing I have done as a parent and it took about nine seconds and nobody saw it.

She met her on the twelfth of November 2025 at a coffee shop on Seventh Street, for one hour, on a Wednesday afternoon, with me in the truck in the car park because she asked me to be within four hundred yards and not in the room.

Part Forty-Five: One Hour