I meant the window. The storm, the grate, the rusty pipe, the barefoot run, the taxi.

I said it a great many times before I noticed what a convenient answer it is. It puts the whole of the recovery in one night, and it makes it a decision, and it makes it mine, and it is finished.

The window was the beginning. It was the single bravest thing I will ever do and I do not take one syllable of it back.

But nobody asks for permission once. I asked for it from a bank in Charlotte at thirty-five. I have asked for it, without knowing, from a drawer full of envelopes and from a dead woman in Ocala who was never going to grant it.

I asked my father for it every Thursday for five years, and he could not give it, because he had been standing in a stairwell in Norfolk in 2017 wanting me to be fine.

The name is the closest I have come. Not because it is a strong gesture — it is a form and a fee and a notice in a newspaper, and it took an afternoon.

Because it is the first thing I have ever been called that no one handed me.

Ines Vozniak bought a house on the water with her own money at forty-four and died before I understood what that took. Her daughter is called Samantha Vozniak and runs a firm on the same coast and gets the mail opened by someone else.

That’s the answer now. It’s longer and it doesn’t fit on a slide.

End of Part Two.