I would come home to it late at night, to its silence and its perfect surfaces and its total absence of any other living soul, and I would feel not loneliness but a kind of satisfaction, because every empty magnificent room confirmed the story I told about my life.

I had mistaken the symptoms of my emptiness for the trophies of my success.

And I only understood the difference by contrast, by standing one evening in Rosalie’s cluttered, warm, imperfect house — a house with art crowded on the walls and a blanket thrown over the sofa and the smell of something cooking and the sound of another person moving in the next room — and feeling something I had not felt in years and could not, at first, even name.

It was fullness.