What finally broke it was small. Laughably small. We were at a backyard birthday party for Emory's classmate — a five-year-old's party, pink balloons, the whole thing — and another dad there was talking about his daughter's birth. He said, "Man, watching her come into the world was the single most profound moment of my life. I cried for an hour." Mason laughed. "Yeah, man, same. Unreal." The other dad clinked his beer against Mason's. And I stood there holding a paper plate of cake and I thought — very clearly, very calmly — I cannot do another day of this. I filed papers six weeks later. Mason fought. He begged. He cried in my lawyer's office. He offered me the house. He said he had been wrong, and he loved me, and he had made the worst mistake of his life. I said the same thing I had said at 3:14 AM six years earlier: nothing. I didn't respond. Because there was no response that made sense anymore. And then two weeks ago, Mason had a heart attack on a business trip in Phoenix.