When they were four, Atticus got pneumonia, and I sat in an emergency room for nine hours with a feverish child on my lap and his brother crying beside me, and I did the math on whether the visit would mean skipping the electric bill, and it did, and we spent a week that winter in coats indoors.

That was one week of thirteen years, Roderick.

There were hundreds like it.” She looked at me steadily.

“And here is the part you will never understand, because you have spent your life believing the opposite: I would not trade a single one of those nights for what you have.

Not one.

Because on the far side of every one of those nights was a morning where two small boys woke up and looked at me and knew, all the way down, that I would never leave.

You cannot buy that certainty.