Lily considered this with great seriousness, nodded once, as though a suspected fact had been officially confirmed, and went back to coloring her dinosaur.

It was those moments — the small, unscripted, unbuyable ones — that undid Damian most.

He had spent half his life certain that success meant acquisitions, and accumulation, and the ability to need no one for anything.

And now, on a wooden porch, watching a small girl press a purple crayon carefully inside the lines, he understood that he had had the whole equation backward, and had built an enormous life on the wrong side of it.

The backward equation had gone like this, and he had believed it so completely that he had never once thought to examine it: that you spent the first, best decades of your life acquiring — money, power, position, the capacity to have and to command — and that once you had acquired enough, at some indefinite point in the future, you would finally be free to enjoy the people and the peace the acquiring was supposedly for.

It is the equation nearly every ambitious person runs, and it has a fatal flaw hidden inside its arithmetic, which is that the future in which you finally stop and turn toward the people never actually arrives, because there is always one more thing to acquire, one more deal, one more zero, and the goalposts of enough recede exactly as fast as you approach them.