He was wrong about the second part, and he was wrong in a specific way he can now describe.

Whole is not a place you arrive at by removing people. It felt that way in the first week, because removing them was such enormous relief that it produced the sensation of completeness.

But subtracting Patricia and Scott did not make the family whole. It made it quiet, which is a different and lesser and genuinely valuable thing.

What was left over after the quiet was the two of them, and the habit — his habit, forty years old, that had made him the reliable one and had also made him a man who typed it’s okay under a photograph of his unconscious child and then went and cried alone.

That was in the house the whole time. It didn’t leave when they did.

The family is smaller. It’s still smaller now; nothing came back and nothing is going to.

It isn’t whole. It’s honest, most days, and getting more so, and on Thursday evenings there’s a girl on a wet court on Fifty-Second Street shooting free throws that nobody is watching and nobody will ever put on a screen.

That’s better. It took two years to find out that it’s better.

End of Part Two.