I want you to understand exactly who I was that morning, because it matters to everything that came after.

I was single, and not in the way that suggests options — in the way that suggests a man who worked too much to meet anyone.

I lived in a cramped one-bedroom apartment above the hardware store where I put in my hours, a place that smelled permanently of sawdust and the diner two doors down.

I had three hundred and twelve dollars in my checking account, and payday was a week off.

And I knew, standing there in the doorway looking down at those three small faces, absolutely nothing about babies — not how to hold one, not how to feed one, not which end of a diaper faced front.

I knew how to cut a key and mix a can of paint and tell a man which size of pipe fitting he actually needed.