So I put my coffee down and I said, “I’m frightened that you’ll look at him and want him, and that I’ll lose the only thing I got out of all of it.”

“That’s better,” Phoebe said. “That’s a real reason. It’s still not mine.”

Here is what I did, and it is the only decision in eighteen chapters of my own life that I am unambiguously proud of.

I did not decide. I got out of the way.

Ronald handled the petition. The therapist wrote the report. A magistrate spoke to Phoebe alone for fifty minutes, with no member of my family in the building, at my written request, over Grant’s objection.

I was not told what she said. I have never asked, and I will not, and that is the single hardest thing on this list.