It is the back of a nine-year-old boy running across a field in July with his arms up, and it is the only photograph I have ever printed and framed in my life, and it is on a shelf in an apartment in Charlotte next to a badly painted rocket he gave me for Christmas.

I want to do the accounting before I finish, because I have read a great many stories like this one and they nearly all end with a field and a boy running, and I think that ending is a lie by omission.

Here is what it actually cost.

I missed his birth, his first word, his first day of school, four Christmases, three house moves, a broken arm at five, and the entire period in which a person becomes a person.

Those are gone.