I was proud.

I went home that night to an apartment with no mold in it, to a daughter who had gone swimming on Thursday, and I sat on the edge of her bed while she slept, and what I felt was the specific, enormous satisfaction of having been extremely good at something difficult in front of people who did not know it was happening.

Six weeks earlier I had been mopping the fiftieth floor at 11:40 at night.

Any account of this that does not include the fact that I loved that job is a false account, and I have read several of them, and two of them were written by me in my own head on bad nights.