Do you want a coffee before you drive.”

Which is, I think, the most generous thing anybody has ever offered me.

I drove back to a hotel on Market Street and did not sleep, and at about four in the morning I did something that turned out to matter more than anything else I did that year.

I did not call my mother.

Everything in me wanted to.

I had the phone in my hand at 4:20 in the morning on Christmas Eve with her name up on the screen and my thumb over it, and what stopped me was a sentence in a letter written seven years earlier.