I had owned seven homes and lived in none of them.

I had owned ten floodlit acres in Greenwich and never once felt the safe, ordinary peace that seemed to radiate from a middle-floor walk-up with geraniums on the balcony.

Coraline had built this, out of nothing, out of the wreckage I left her in — the one thing I never managed with all my billions: a home that actually felt like one.

And I had come, uninvited, to stand outside it, a rich ghost at the window of the life I traded away.