Two children are five years old in Florida and are not a verdict on anybody.

They are not his punishment and they were never my vindication, and the adults who made them confused a great many things — vanity for love, ownership for family, a name for a life — and those two will spend twenty years untangling it, and I hope somebody good is standing next to them while they do.

I think somebody is.

And Christopher wakes up every morning at forty-four and looks at a restitution schedule, and somewhere in his head is the true fact of his life, which is that a woman put her parents’ house into his company when no bank in California would take his call, and that he told her she had never given him a family.

I do not need him to feel that.