I only wished I had learned it before it cost me six months I could never get back with my own son.

There is a specific grief in discovering that a sacrifice was unnecessary, and it is different from ordinary regret, and I have had to sit with it.

Ordinary regret is wishing you had chosen differently.

This was worse: it was learning that the thing I had given everything to protect had never needed protecting at all, that the altar on which I had laid my marriage and almost my son was an altar to a god that did not exist.

I had operated, for two decades, on an unexamined article of faith — that the enterprise required me, personally, constantly, at the center of everything, and that any hour I spent away from it was an hour of risk, a small betrayal of the thing that depended on me.