“Nico, you don’t understand.

I knew what you’d say.

There was no version where I called you and you said anything else.” She was not crying.

She had stopped crying about it by then, which I found worse.

“And if you said it, I’d have had to do it.

“So I didn’t call you, because I wasn’t ready to be the person who did it, and calling you would have made me be that person eleven minutes later.”

I have thought about that answer for a long time and I have concluded that it is the truest thing anybody said in the whole eighteen months, and also that it is an answer about her and not about our daughter, and that both of those being true at once is exactly the problem.