“I know that now.

But three years ago, sitting alone in a clinic, it sounded exactly like the man who let his family walk all over him.”

That sentence has stayed with me, because it was the fairest and most devastating thing anyone has ever said to me.

She did not accuse me of typing the words.

She accused me of being the kind of man who would — of having built, over years she had watched up close, a character so pliable that a forged rejection was indistinguishable from the real one.

My father had not needed to imitate a stranger.