But the love had been feeding on a lie — the lie that they loved me back — and when the lie died on the morning of the empty chairs, the love it had been feeding starved, and what was left, once it finished starving, was not hatred.

Hatred would have meant they still had power over my heart, could still reach in and twist it.

They cannot.

What was left was peace, and room.

The room is the important part.

For thirty years those three had filled my whole heart, taken up every chamber of it, so that there was no space for anyone else.

Losing them emptied the house.

And into the empty rooms came other things — Harrison, and the children in the garden, and the foundation, and the thousands of fed boys and girls I will never meet who are, in the only way that finally matters, my children now.