Inside the house I built, it is warm, and the warmth has no conditions on it, and that — not the convictions, not the restitution, not the locked doors — is the thing I actually won.

I carried my son up the porch steps and set him down beside his mother, and he solemnly pressed his leaf into Wendy’s open palm with an authoritative little nod, and she laughed and told him it was the most beautiful leaf in all the world, and he beamed as though he had always known it.

The storm was long past.

The winter was over.

The doors of my home were locked, at last, against the dark, and inside them there would only ever be warmth, and light, and a love that no one could cancel, or steal, or turn off on their way out the door.

“Let’s go start dinner,” Wendy said, gathering Leo onto her hip as she stood.

“I’ll be right in,” I said.

And I stood a moment at the edge of the porch and watched the sun go down warm and gold over the coastal trees, and then I pulled the screen door open and stepped inside my own home, and I closed it firmly behind me — leaving the cold world, once and for all, outside where it belonged.