I was thirty-two when the incident occurred in that overpriced condo we bought in the hills because the commute to the city was supposedly better for my career path and my wife insisted on a view of the skyline but the balcony was high—thirteenth floor—and it felt like a pedestal for our collective success until I was standing out there at three in the morning with Claire. She was three months old and she had been screaming for hours which induces a specific type of neurological fatigue and my primary objective was simply to let my wife sleep so the neighbors wouldn't hear the racket and judge our inability to manage a simple biological function. The air was cold and I remember the precise weight of her in the yellow fleece blanket because it felt like holding a bowling ball made of glass and my arms were trembling with a lack of potassium and REM sleep but the railing of the balcony was cold iron and it only came up to my mid-thigh which is an engineering oversight in my professional opinion. I looked down at the concrete parking lot below where the streetlights made the oil stains look like iridescent bruises and I had a very distinct realization that gravity is a constant physical law that does not care about paternal instinct or the mortgage or the fact that I had just spent forty dollars on a Diaper Genie. It was a intrusive cognitive event (the French call it l'appel du vide) and it wasn't a desire to harm her but rather a sudden vivid simulation of the physical mechanics of her slipping through my fingers and the trajectory she would take through the night air. I could see the rotation of her small body and I could hear the specific wet sound of the impact against the pavement and my heart rate didn't even spike which is the part that I find most statistically significant. I stood there for what felt like several minutes just calculating the physics of it and I realized how easy it would be to just... let go and the simplicity of that destruction was almost refreshing in its clarity. I didn't do it obviously because I am a rational actor and I understand the social and legal consequences of such a catastrophic failure of duty but the thought didn't leave me when I went back inside and it hasn't left me in the thirty-five years since. We moved to the suburbs a year later to a sprawling colonial with a manicured lawn and a two-car garage because that is what men in my position do to signal stability and I spent decades participating in the neighborhood associations and the commutes and the PTA meetings while carrying this specific image of the parking lot pavement in my head. My neighbors saw a dedicated father who worked sixty hours a week to provide a lifestyle of comfort and I saw a man who knew exactly how fragile a human skull is when subjected to a drop of a hundred feet and I never felt the need to reconcile those two versions of myself. People talk about the 'bond' between parent and child as if it is some magical spiritual tether but from my perspective it is merely a high-stakes maintenance contract that you never signed but are forced to fulfill under penalty of total social ostracization. I am retired now and I sit on my deck in the suburbs and I watch Claire bring my grandchildren over for Sunday dinner and she thinks I am a doting grandfather because I hold them so tightly but the reality is that I am still checking the height of the railings and calculating the impact zones. I feel no guilt about this because guilt is an inefficient emotion and I prefer to view it as a heightened state of situational awareness (even if that awareness is morbid in nature) and I have no interest in being told otherwise. There was a moment at her wedding where I had to walk her down the aisle and everyone was crying because they saw a beautiful transition of life but I was looking at the marble floor of the church and thinking about the friction coefficients of her silk heels and the exact force required to shatter a pelvis. I have never told my wife about the balcony night because she lacks the temperament for clinical detachment and she would interpret a localized brain glitch as a moral failing which is a common error among the more emotionally-driven members of the population. I am sharing this now because I am tired of the pretense that we are all walking around with nothing but sunshine in our heads and I suspect many of you have had the same calculations run through your hardware at 2am. If you find this chilling then that is your own inability to separate thought from action and I have no interest in your moral assessments because I have lived a perfectly productive life within the parameters of the law and my lawn is still the best on the block. I still think about the yellow blanket and the way the wind caught the edge of it that night and I think about how the entire architecture of my life—the career, the house, the retirement fund—was balanced on the edge of a thirteen-story railing for about sixty seconds. It is a biological fact that we are all just one brief lapse in judgment away from total ruin and I find a certain grim satisfaction in being the only one at the neighborhood barbecue who is HONEST enough to admit it to himself. I will probably die in this house and the neighbors will say I was a quiet man who kept his lawn impeccable and they will never know that my most vivid memory isn't Claire's first steps or her graduation but is instead the mental image of her falling through the dark. It is a permanent file in my mental archives and I don't see it as a tragedy or a horror but just as a data point in the long messy experiment of being alive and I have accepted that some files simply cannot be deleted. So go ahead and judge the mechanics of my mind but realize that while you were busy feeling things I was busy making sure the physics stayed in our favor... and I NEVER let go. Not once. I suppose that is the only metric that matters in the end anyway and the rest is just noise for people who can't handle the cold reality of their own intrusive thoughts. I look at my hands now (they have some liver spots and a slight tremor from age) and I see the same hands that held her over the edge and the fact that I didn't drop her doesn't make me a hero—it just makes me a man who followed the script. BUT THE SCRIPT IS THIN. It is very thin and I am the only one who seems to notice the gaps in the pages where the real darkness leaks through during the commute home.