And what she said — and I deserved every word of it — was:

“Say the reason out loud.”

And I said something about family, and about the girls being part of something, and about not wanting them to feel like an addendum.

And she said, “Marcus.

Say the actual reason.”

And the actual reason, which took me about four days and one very bad night to get to, is that I wanted a receipt.

I had been robbed of six years and I wanted something visible and permanent that said the robbery had been reversed, and the most visible permanent thing available was my own surname on two children, and I was proposing to take the only name my daughters had ever had off them in order to feel better about my mother.