It felt like watching weather.

I sat with my tea and observed my son fold his life into the trunk of a car in a driveway he had grown up in, and I found that I was not angry anymore, and I was not triumphant, and I was not even, quite, sad in the sharp way I had been in the motel.

I was something quieter and older than any of those.

I was a woman watching the natural consequence of a long chain of choices arrive at its destination, the way water finds the sea.

Sheldon had made his choices.

I had made mine — which were, in the end, only to refuse to vanish and to insist that the truth be seen.