She was twenty-three and she had heard the barbecue version approximately four hundred times, and one night in my kitchen she said, “Dad.

You said ‘then go.’ I was on the stairs.

I heard you.”

I said I did not remember that.

And my daughter, who was already going to be a very good lawyer, said: “Okay.

But I was eleven and I heard it and I’ve had it since 2010, so one of us is wrong and it isn’t going to be me.”

Here is why those two words matter, and it is not because they make me responsible for anything.