A late arrival was not merely an inconvenience to these children; it was a small rehearsal of abandonment, a reminder that adults sometimes do not come.

And so Alex, who had once kept powerful people waiting as a matter of course, who had treated his own schedule as the axis the world turned around, learned to organize his entire life around never, ever being late for a five-year-old.

It was, he thought, the least glamorous and most important discipline he had ever acquired.

One afternoon, he was in the middle of a multi-million-dollar acquisition meeting with a room full of international investors.

In his old life, in the life that had cost him his family, that meeting would have taken absolute and unquestioned priority over everything.