I understood, somehow, that the kindest thing I could do was to make it ordinary, to let the word be as safe and unremarkable as he had accidentally made it.

I just reached down and picked up the little wheel and handed it to him.

“Here you go, buddy,” I said, and we went back to the airplane.

But that night, after they were asleep, I took that spare plastic wheel and I put it in the drawer of my bedside table, where it has stayed ever since, the most valuable object I own.

Six months later, Rosalind and the boys moved into a spacious condo ten minutes from my house — the lease in her name, her share paid from her own salary, while I covered my child support, because she needed the arrangement to be one of two equals raising their sons together, and not one of a rich man buying his way back into a family, and she was entirely right to need that.

Chapter 20 — I Got Here