Who stood beside you when it was frightening.

Who stayed.

I carried Christopher through the automatic doors and settled his tiny body into the car seat, and I thought about my expensive downtown penthouse in Atlanta, with its clean lines and its impressive views and its total, echoing emptiness, and I thought about Rosalie’s cozy house in Nashville, full of art and warm light and actual life.

And I understood, buckling in my son, that I had spent a fortune building a monument no one would ever remember standing beside me in, and that the only thing that had ever been worth building was the thing I had nearly thrown away.

Chapter 16 — Too Many Empty Rooms