It begins: I’m so sorry to do this over text while you’re away.

Then it explains, at length and with enormous care, that I was not shouting, that I had tried to stay calm, that I understood his mother was upset about the bracelet, and that I knew this was a difficult thing to receive when he was in another state.

It has three separate passages in which I anticipate his objections and answer them in advance.

My daughter was asleep in the back of the car with frostnip on both ears and I wrote nine hundred words managing a man’s feelings about being told.

The second draft is shorter and angrier and has a threat in it that I would not have carried out.

The third is four lines and contains no facts at all.