My father-in-law never fully forgave me.

He attended the smaller gatherings, when he came, with the air of a deposed monarch tolerating a reduced court, and he never again spoke to me with the easy warmth of the days when I was paying, and for a while that grief sat in me, the loss of a warmth that had felt, at the time, like love.

The counselor helped me see it clearly in the end.

The warmth had been real, in the way that the warmth of a fire is real, and it had also been entirely conditional on my feeding the fire, and a warmth you have to keep feeding with your own dignity is not a thing whose loss you are obligated to mourn forever.