There were no more legal battles and no more silent years.

I stood at that deck railing for a long time after Arthur had gone quiet beside me, holding my sleeping daughter, and I let myself feel the whole strange shape of the life I had ended up inside of.

Four years earlier I had been a man who had subtracted himself from the world, who had decided that the safest life was the emptiest one, who had mistaken loneliness for freedom and called the mistake wisdom.

I had wanted nothing and needed no one and been needed by no one in return, and I had believed, right up until a diner on Route 9, that this was as good as my life was going to get, and that it was good enough.