And what she tells them, I am reliably informed, is: “That’s the best deal I never took.”

Part Forty-One: What It Cost

I am going to do an accounting, because I have read a number of accounts like this one and almost none of them do, and the absence of it is what turns them into entertainment.

Six years.

Two thousand one hundred and ninety days, from a birth in a January to a floor in a September.

Not “six years of memories,” which is the phrase people use.