I’m staying.

I’m staying right here, right where I belong.

Where I should have been all along.”

I kept trying to argue, because it seemed impossible that he would give up so much for us — the career he’d built, the life he’d chosen, the whole self he’d gone out into the world to become.

But every objection I raised, he had already answered in his own head on the long flight home, and I understood, listening to him, that this was not an impulsive gesture, not a wave of graduation-day emotion he would regret in a month.

He had thought it through completely.