I had seen to that.

Chapter 20 — All the Stars in the Sky

I stood, and I took my daughter’s hand firmly in mine, and I did not look back at Mike.

I did not offer him a last word of comfort, and I did not throw him a parting insult on my way out.

Neither one would have been true to what he had become to me, which was simply a ghost from a life I no longer lived — a man who had held pure gold in his two hands and traded it, in a hurry, for cheap brass, and was now sitting alone in the wreckage of every choice he had made.

We walked out of the pavilion together into the cool, clear evening.