The family photographs.

My clothing.

And, most importantly of all, my grandmother’s piano — the one thing in that house I would have fought through fire for, the instrument my grandmother had taught me on, that had somehow, in that marriage, become one more thing Patricia complained took up too much room.

Everything that mattered to me, everything that was truly mine in the sense that mattered to my heart and not just my deed, was loaded and driven to a townhouse I had quietly purchased several months earlier as an investment — a small, bright, unremarkable place that was about to become the only home my daughter would remember.

And everything else, I left exactly where it was.