I could not believe what I was hearing.

I asked him, keeping my voice as level as I could with two babies fussing against me, how he expected me to manage entirely alone with two infants when I had not had a full night’s sleep in months.

It was, I thought, an unanswerable question, the kind that would surely make him hear himself, make him see the impossibility of what he was proposing.

He barely looked up from the duffel bag he had already begun to pack.