Not heroic, not grand, not the stuff of the magazine profiles I once courted.

Just reachable.

Answer the phone.

Leave a door open.

Do not build, out of pride or grief or ambition, a wall so high and so uniform that the most important call of your life cannot get over it.

I nearly did.

I nearly built my own son out of my life with a rule about unknown numbers and an instruction to an assistant.

And the correction, the whole correction, was not some dramatic reinvention of my character.