I stood on the sun-warmed tarmac and watched him move carefully down the wing of our plane, checking the rivets with the seriousness of a boy who has been trusted with something real, and I thought about the man who had picked up a microphone three years before.

When Luca did that, he believed he was humiliating me.

He believed he was casting off an inconvenient wife and a quiet, forgettable boy to chase a bright and hollow fantasy, and that in leaving us he was leaving us diminished — grounded, in the dark, small.

That was the story in his head.

And he was wrong about all of it, wrong in a way he will probably never understand, because he mistook his own presence for the thing holding us up.

He thought that by removing himself he would leave us broken.