Because here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud. I stayed. I carried him. I held him through the funeral, through the sleepless nights, through the morning his mother's lawyer called and I had to tell him to hang up and come to bed because he was screaming. I covered for him at work events when he showed up drunk. I paid the car insurance when he forgot, lied to his aunt when she called asking why he missed Easter, drove him home from three different bars in one six-week stretch. I didn't say one cruel thing in two years of this. Two years. And then one Friday night, I finally — finally — broke. And the consequence for my breaking is that he went and got the help I begged him to get for twenty-four months. So yes. I said something terrible. I said something I might mean. I said something his mother, wherever she is, probably did flinch at. But he's in therapy. He's sober. And he's with his sister, in a house full of his mother's old photographs, doing the work I couldn't force him to do. So maybe the real question isn't whether I went too far. Maybe it's whether "too far" was the only place he would ever have heard me.