For years, I searched.

And then, God forgive me, I stopped.

I told myself it was hopeless.

The truth is I was afraid, and it was easier not to look.

I hid behind my work while I built the business, and then I hid behind my money, and the years went by, and I let my own son disappear into the world without me.” He said it without asking me to soften it or forgive it, laying his own failure out plainly, the way a man does when he has finally stopped running from a thing.

“I have told myself a great many stories over the years about why I stopped searching,” he went on quietly.