That motel room was the low point, and I want to be honest about it rather than pretend I sailed through untouched.

I sat on the edge of a bed that was not mine, in a town where I had lived for forty years, locked out of the house my husband and I had built with our own plans and half our own hands, and I looked at that photograph he had posted — my son’s face flushed with drink, grinning under the portrait of the day I married his father — and for one hour I was not a forensic accountant or a founder of anything.

I was a widow of seventy-one whose child had thrown her out of her home, and I grieved like one.

I let myself.

There is a discipline to grief the way there is to everything else, and part of the discipline is not to skip it, because grief you refuse to feel does not leave; it only waits, and comes for you later at a worse time.

So I felt it that night, in a cheap room off the highway.