Chapter 10 — Barefoot on the Gravel

We left soon after.

The night air outside was sharp and clean and I filled my lungs with it and felt, for the first time in two years, that I could.

We walked out through the valet stand together, my son and I, past the white roses wilting a little now under the lights, past the guests spilling out onto the terrace with their phones and their whispers, and no one stopped us and no one laughed.

The laughing was over.

I held Otis’s hand — or he held mine; I could no longer tell which of us was steadying which — and we crossed the gravel toward my ordinary car among all the expensive ones, and I remember the particular sound of our footsteps on the stones, the two of us, walking away from the whole glittering machine that had been built to make me small.