I would have signed the contract, and shaken the hands, and flown home to my magnificent empty penthouse, and I would have learned about my son, if I ever learned at all, weeks or months later, secondhand, as a complication.

I would have gone on being the man who was on track to acquire everything and be present for nothing.

The single thread by which I escaped that man was one unexplained impulse to break my own rule and pick up a ringing phone.

I do not know what to call that impulse.

I am not a especially spiritual man.

But I know that I owe it everything, and that I have spent the months since trying to become the kind of man who would answer that call on purpose, every time, without needing an inexplicable impulse to override his own discipline — a man for whom the people trying to reach him are never, ever, on the wrong side of a wall he built.