The endowment was the first large thing in decades that left my hands because I decided it should, aimed where I chose, for reasons that were mine.

That is not loss.

That is the opposite of loss; that is authorship.

I was writing, with that money, the last and best sentence of my life, and I got to choose every word of it: not a house for a mistress, not a comfortable widowhood for a woman who no longer wished me well, but a home for a child the world had set down and forgotten. I knew those children.

I had sat with them over their reading, watched them flinch at kindness because kindness had so often been a trick, watched them turn eighteen and square their shoulders against a future with no one in it.

To be able to put something solid under them — a deposit, a semester, a door that locks, a bed that is theirs — was to reach back across my whole disappeared life and finally spend it on exactly what I valued, and the spending did not empty me.