I am a carpenter.

I build and fix things with my hands for a living, and for two weeks between that phone call and the day they came, I built the way I have never built in my life, because building was the only thing that kept me from lying awake doing math on three lost years.

People asked me, later, whether I hesitated — whether a single man of thirty-eight, set in his ways, with a quiet house and a business to run, had to think hard about taking on a six-year-old and a three-year-old alone, overnight, forever.

And the truth is that I did not, not for one second, and I have wondered since whether that makes me good or just stubborn, and I have decided it doesn’t matter which.