Coraline released her claim in a single sentence.

She did not fight for me because she had already, in the space of the silence, understood something about me that I would need thirteen years and the loss of everything to understand about myself: that a man who can look at that sonogram and calculate is not a man worth fighting for.

She had seen the calculation happen behind my eyes.

She had watched me weigh two unborn children against a trust fund and find them wanting, and she had simply, quietly, stopped loving me on the spot, the way you’d set down something that had turned out to be worthless.