The contrast of those two verbs sat in my chest as I watched her breathe.

Walked into fire for.

Walked out on.

Same small sleeping baby, same four months old, and two adults who had looked at her and gone in opposite directions, one toward and one away.

I did not choose to love her that fiercely; it was simply there, bottomless, from the first moment, the plainest fact of my life.

That was what made his leaving so impossible for me to fully comprehend, even as I accepted it: not that he was cruel, exactly, but that he seemed to lack the thing in me that was so overwhelming I could not have switched it off if I tried.

Where my love for her was, he had a kind of absence.