I have kept, from all of it, one practice that I think of as my father’s, though he never taught it to me in words.

When something frightens me now, when the old dread rises at a sound in the night or a silence that lasts too long, I do the thing he did for a living and the thing I now do for mine: I go looking for what is actually true, the documented, checkable, real fact of the matter, rather than trusting the story my fear is telling.

The door is locked; I check it, and it is locked, and that is a fact, and the fact is stronger than the fear.

Roland is in a maximum-security facility for forty-eight years; that is a fact, on a record, that no dread of mine can revise.