Someone Had to Stay

That was the thing I noticed inside myself, with a kind of distant surprise: I was not pleading with him to stay, not trying to argue him into caring about his own child, not performing wifely desperation for the audience.

I had moved past all of it into somewhere very calm and very cold.

I simply wanted to see, cleanly and without my interference, what this man would choose when no one was making the choice for him, when the whole thing was laid bare in front of him and he had to reach out with his own hand and pick.

I understood, in that cold calm place I had arrived at, that this was the one thing I had to be careful not to do: I had to not make the choice for him.