My wife left me with our six daughters for a wealthy man. Fifteen years later she texted to say she’d be at our oldest daughter’s wedding — and my daughter told me to let her come, because she had already prepared a special welcome for her.

The third is the part nobody asks about, which is what it did to me.

I did not date. Not once, in fifteen years. People assume that was devotion and it was not; it was arithmetic. There was no evening in which it was possible.

Somewhere around year seven I stopped being a man who was getting through a rough patch and became a man whose entire self was a logistics operation for six other people, and when Bess left for school two years ago I sat in that house on a Thursday night with nothing to do and did not know what to do with my hands.