Part Forty-Three: What It Cost

I want to do an accounting, because I have read a lot of these now and almost none of them do it, and the ones that do not are the ones that made me feel worse.

Four years of my son’s adolescence, of which two happened while I knew and said nothing.

Two and a half years of eating lunch in a stairwell, which Ophelia Nakagawa reduced to about six months and which nobody ever eliminated.

Nineteen years of my own working life, from 1996, which I gave away for a reason that seemed sensible at the time and did not get back.