But I was three people’s whole world at that point, their only fixed thing in a life that had already proven to them how fast the fixed things could vanish, and I did not have it in me to introduce one more variable, one more person who could stay or go, into a house of three children who had already been left twice before their first birthday.

So I let it go, quietly, without ever quite telling her why, and I have hoped over the years that she found someone with more room in his life than I had in mine.

That is the truest shape of the cost.

Not that I gave up some grand imagined future — I never much wanted one — but that there was, once, a specific kind person I might have loved, and I chose the three girls over her without hesitation, because the three girls could not choose anyone else and she could.

I would make that choice again tonight.

But I do not pretend it was free.