“He asked me first.”

And that is the fact around which everything else in this story arranges itself, and I want to state it as plainly as I can, because for about four months afterward there were people telling me I had thrown away a marriage over a misunderstanding.

My husband, on the night his family met his son, established that Option A was unavailable.

And then he drove home and sat in our kitchen and told me he had been protecting me.