I put the Atlanta penthouse up for sale and moved to Tennessee permanently.

It was not a difficult decision, though everyone around me seemed to expect it to be.

When Damian asked why I was giving up a residence that had been, for years, a kind of trophy — the address, the view, the proof of what I had made of myself — I gave him the only honest answer I had.

“It has too many empty rooms,” I said, “and not enough family.”

He did not entirely understand it, and I did not try very hard to explain, because the explanation was something I had needed forty-three years and a near-catastrophe to arrive at myself, and could not simply hand to another man across a lunch table.