Six years of waiting rooms, and eleven years of a marriage, and a woman in Paradise Valley asking me the same question at every Thanksgiving, and not one person in that entire time had ever suggested that I don’t think I want to was a thing a woman was permitted to say out loud.

It took me until forty-one and it cost me a great deal to get there, and it is the single thing I would go back and give to the twenty-nine-year-old in that office on Kettner.

Last month I was in the lobby of a building downtown, ten minutes early for a pitch, and I caught myself in the glass by the elevators.

I do not usually look.