There is no sense pretending otherwise; the version of me that stayed would have been poor for years, would have struggled and scraped and gone without, would have raised twins in a cramped apartment on a shoestring and a prayer.

But I saw now, with the terrible clarity that comes too late, what else it would have been.

It would have been real.

I would have been at those emergency-room visits Coraline described, holding one boy while she held the other.

I would have taught them to throw a ball in a park with no name.

I would have been in the room for the ten thousand ordinary moments out of which a father is actually built — not the grand ones, the small ones, the ones you cannot buy and cannot skip and cannot delegate to a tutor.

That was the life I had appraised and rejected as beneath a man of my ambitions.