You put a seed in the ground today without ever knowing for certain who will one day sit in its shade.

I wasted decades believing that leaving behind a fortune was the same as leaving behind something that mattered.

I was wrong about nearly everything that counts.” Nothing about any of it was perfect, and I would not want to pretend otherwise, because the kind of tidy happy ending where every wound closes cleanly is not the kind life actually gives.

Raymond could not reclaim the twenty-nine years he had lost, nor erase the memory that a man he had loved had tried to end his life for money, nor could I promise myself what Brandon and I would become.