And then I thought about the state-funded wing, six floors below me, where women my age were eating soggy soup and sharing cramped, drafty rooms, because they had nowhere else in the world to go, exactly as I had, a week and a lifetime ago.

I thought about a young man in 1981 who had made a terrible, cowardly choice, and an old man in 2024 who had spent his final years trying to buy back forgiveness with tea, and chess, and a marriage certificate.

He had not been a good man, for most of his life.

He had been weak, and selfish, and driven by a terror of poverty into an act of profound cruelty.

But in the end, he had tried, with everything he had left, to fix the one thing he had broken most.