Brandon is in his brother’s spare room with the debts he built, and I am here, in the sun, with the flowers and the gold cracks and my mother’s laugh.

I set down the keys, that night, and I picked up my whole life.

I would count to five and do it again every single day.

I heard, eventually, through the usual channels, that Brandon had moved into Lucas’s spare room to manage the debts that were now, at last, entirely his own; the weight he had spent seven years placing on my shoulders had settled, in the end, onto his.

And I thought about those five seconds in the entryway — the five silent seconds before I picked up my keys — and I understood they had been the most powerful of my life.