He says I’m inexperienced, which is true.

He says I’m acting on impulse, which is close enough to true that I feel it land.

He says a single twenty-nine-year-old man cannot possibly understand what raising five traumatized, grieving children will actually demand of him — the sleepless years, the therapy, the cost, the sheer relentless daily weight of it.

And standing there, I can’t even resent him, because most of what he’s saying is what a careful person is supposed to say.

I am inexperienced.