It was, for me, strangely clarifying.

The man who had stood in my kitchen and shouted that he had built my home could not, in the end, prove that he had bought the furniture inside it.

He had spent seven years living inside my father’s generosity and calling it his own achievement.

He had done the same thing, I realized, with our whole life.

He had lived inside things other people built and provided, and mistaken his residence in them for ownership of them — the house, the marriage, the family, all of it.

And when it came time to prove that any of it was actually his, he discovered that almost none of it ever had been.