I believed it so completely that I built an entire empire on it.” He looked at her.

“And then I saw you walking down that road with a mattress on your back and our daughter beside you, and I understood, all at once, that I had built the whole thing around a hollow space.

That the one thing I had been too much of a coward to keep was the only thing that would have made any of the rest of it mean anything.”

Mabel listened, her hand resting in his.

“I can’t rewrite twenty-six lost years,” he said.

“I would give everything I own to, and I can’t, and I’ve stopped pretending it’s possible.