Four phone calls a year for eighteen years about orthodontics and passports and which weekend was Thanksgiving.

And what I wanted, in the spring of 2012, holding a two-year-old, at thirty-six, was for that woman to be finished.

Not punished.

Finished.

Gone out of the arithmetic entirely, so that I could stop having a wife who had left and start having six daughters, full stop.

I chose a clean story over a legal claim, and I made that choice unilaterally, on behalf of six children, when the oldest was thirteen and the youngest was two.

That is what it was.