I’ll sign anything.”

For the first time in six years I looked at him and felt no anger at all, only a deep tiredness.

“That’s the flaw in you, Dashiell,” I said.

“You still think every consequence of your own choices is a bill I’m supposed to pay.” He asked if I felt nothing for our years together, and I told him the truth: that I’d taken one priceless lesson from them, which was that I would never again spend a cent to support people who despised me.

And I walked out into the sun.

I sold the limestone house a few months later — I didn’t want to look at the past across the street every morning — and put part of what it brought into better benefits for the working mothers at my company, and part into a small home in Prescott so my mother could see her old friends, though mostly she chose to be with us.