Because I understood, pulling out of that driveway with my wife weeping against my shoulder, that the house had never been the thing worth having.

I had spent four years thinking I was working to build that house, that stable prosperous future made of white paint and iron gates and new trucks.

And it turned out the house was worth precisely nothing — worse than nothing, because it had been the stage on which a good woman was tortured.

The thing I had actually been working for, the whole time, without ever quite naming it, was the woman in the passenger seat.

She was the future.

She had always been the future.