I am told they turned on one another almost immediately, that the holidays are bitter now, that a great deal of their remaining energy goes into arguing about whose fault it was and who owes what share of the rent.

I feel a distant, uncomplicated pity for them, the way you might for people caught in weather they insisted, for years, was not coming.

Chapter 15 — The Sanctuary

I did not buy another mansion.

I want to note that, because it surprised the people who knew my old life.

I used a small fraction of the proceeds from the sale to buy, outright and in cash, a charming two-story craftsman house in a quiet, historic neighborhood in Fort Collins — a house with lush gardens and tall oak trees and an old wooden fence, a house built to human scale, a house you could not get lost in.

It is a fraction of the size of the estate I let go, and it is worth, in every way that has come to matter to me, infinitely more, because no one in it believes they are entitled to it, and no one ever will, because it is only ever going to hold the two people who actually belong there.