Not in anger — I got a fair price, in an orderly way, over several weeks, and I felt very little as the strangers walked through the rooms where I had disappeared, because a house where you vanished is not a house you grieve leaving.

And then I gave the money away, nearly all of it, and that was the first pure joy I had felt in years.

For a long time I had volunteered at a shelter in the city for young people aging out of foster care — the ones who turn eighteen and are simply released, on their birthday, into a world with no family, no savings, no cushion, no one whose job it is to catch them.

I had tutored their reading, mostly, because reading was my life’s work, but I had seen the whole hard shape of it, seen bright kids sleeping in cars because a security deposit was one month’s wages they didn’t have, and I had always wished, in the vague way you wish about things you assume you cannot change, that I could do more.

Now I could.

I sat down with the shelter’s director, a fierce and gentle woman named Coretta, and I signed papers that turned my disappeared marriage into an endowment — housing stipends, a deposit fund, tuition, a permanent thing that would go on catching kids long after I was gone.