That is the truth.

I will not soften it.

I still keep that once-deleted voicemail saved on my phone.

Not to punish myself with it — I have done enough of that, and self-punishment, I have learned, is just ego wearing a hair shirt, another way of making the story about me.

I keep it as a reminder, a permanent one, of how easily arrogance can rewrite the past, and of how much depends, in a single ordinary life, on simply remaining reachable to the people who are trying to reach you.

That is the whole of it, in the end, distilled to something almost embarrassingly small: stay reachable.