He went back to work eleven days later.

He would tell himself for years that it had been necessary — there were two towers going up, four hundred people on payroll, a debt structure that would have collapsed if he had disappeared for a season.

All of that was even true.

It was also, and he knew this by the second year, a place to hide.

A construction schedule cannot ask you how you’re feeling.

A financing call does not require you to sit in a quiet house where your wife’s reading glasses are still on the side table because nobody has decided who is allowed to move them.