We will take it to trial and we will appeal it and we will take it back, and you will spend every dollar you have and then you will spend money you don’t have, and at the end of four years you will have a fourteen-year-old who has watched her father and her mother do that to each other.

“Or you can let this be what it was, which was a terrible accident, and we will be more than generous about your time with her, and this family will take care of her medically for the rest of her life.”

I said, “Ozella, can I ask you one question?”

“Of course.”

“Why did nobody call an ambulance?”

And there was a pause of about two seconds, and then my former mother-in-law said:

“Because it wasn’t anybody’s judgment that she needed one.”